


Vector

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:25:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 59,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Exposure

-1-

Later, much later, he might think about the banality of evil, about the way things crash down on you out of a clear blue sky. The sky isn't clear when they drive into town, but everything else is mundane. Mundane for here. Bombed out houses, scorched walls. The empty hulks of looted stores with the front windows smashed out. Shelters made of canvas and scrap metal dotting the landscape here and there, or half-destroyed houses that somehow appear to be lived in. You live where you can. You live on what you can. This is supposed to be a big town for the area, the kind of population center that you don't often see anymore outside of the biggest cities, or the carcasses of the same. Tom leans against the wire mesh of the window and stares at the world moving by. A long time ago, he stopped feeling quite so much for these people. It's go numb or go insane.

Outside Pittsburgh. Outside Cleveland, outside Chicago, outside Indianapolis, outside St. Louis. Outside. It's all outside. There is no inside anymore. The world is gutted. Santiago City is makeup on a corpse.

He doesn't always think like this. They haven't eaten much in a couple of days. Dexter snuffles at his neck. _This is what I have to save?_

"Keep your eyes peeled," Mike mutters from the driver's seat. Mike can hold his own in these settings, but Tom's never got the feeling that he likes it or feels even close to at ease. It makes sense. The more people, the more things to watch for.

"What for?" Tom reaches up to rub at his head. For hours now there's been a low pounding behind his eyes and it doesn't show any signs of subsiding. The dull, diffused light outside isn't helping either, more like sandpaper than anything that stabs, slowly wearing him down. He just wants to sleep.

"Anything. Place to eat, first of all." Florence reaches forward from the backseat and nudges him lightly, directing his attention ahead and to the left, to a small ramshackle stand which appears to be displaying racks of some kind of meat. Cooked, that's what kind, Tom thinks as he sits up straighter. That's the most important thing, he's learned. Dog, cat, rat, food is food. And if it's dog he just tries to not think too hard about it.

They pull over in the dusty street and Dexter hops out when Tom opens the passenger door. Tom follows, less enthusiastic. He knows he's hungry, but the idea of food right now is almost nauseating. This isn't right. His mouth should be watering. He should feel stirrings of a deep and primal need, profoundly familiar by now. He never really knew what hunger was...

But that's not what he's feeling.

He hangs back as Mike and Florence head over to the stand, to the grimy-looking proprietor. He scuff his boots in the dust. This used to be a paved road, a main road, but then drought came, the long-distance ravages of a nuclear blast, and now the painted lines are mostly lost beneath a blowing shroud of dirt.

A woman carrying a bundle of rags passes, hunched and shuffling. He has no idea of her age. She could be any age at all, but time isn't kind to anyone here. She raises her head, squints at him, spits out of a toothless mouth and moves on.

The owner of the meat stand is making expansive gestures, talking rapidly. He can't quite make it out. He walks closer.

"Whoa, okay." Mike is holding up his hands, looking like he might be about to back away. Not afraid. But not wanting any part of... something. "Look, we just came for some food. If you're not selling, I guess we're not buying. We'll be on our way."

"No." The man—Tom thinks it's a man—is gesturing down a back alley strewn with trash. "You must come. Her—" He points to Florence. "She is healer. Yes?"

_How do they always know?_ Her muteness isn't obvious until you've spent more than a short amount of time with her. She doesn't wear white and she carries a gun. But she does have a sense about her, an aura of calm, and that's something that few people carry with them. Tom steps up behind them.

"What's going on?"

Mike shakes his head in exasperation and turns aside. "This clown thinks we're some kinda goddamn traveling hospital. Says his wife's sick. Wants us to help."

"Well? Why can't we?"

Mike gives him a look that he's seen about a thousand times by now. "Because, Mother Theresa, if we stopped to help everyone who needs help we'd never get outta town. Look, I know it bugs you, but it's a question of what's practical."

"He's one man." With the headache he desperately doesn't feel like arguing, but somehow he can't seem to help himself. "I'm not saying we open up a goddamn charity, Pinocchio, but if we can help her, what's ten minutes either way?"

Florence has turned to them, forming a familiar little circle, listening to them. At Tom's last word she lays a hand on Mike's shoulder and gives him a look that seems to silence whatever protest he'd been about to voice. He looks down at his boots and then back up at her and allows a single grudging nod.

"Fine. But that's it."

Tom shrugs. "If nothing else, he might give us free supplies."

That thought seems to cheer Mike slightly as they head off down the alley, the man having called in a smaller and dirtier version of himself—possibly a brother or a son—to watch the food stand for him. The buildings arch over them, appearing almost to lean; everything now feels so much more fragile. Like a nudge is all it would take to send the rest of it over the edge. Tom kicks a broken bottle out of the way and it smashes against a loose brick, sending a rat skittering out of one hiding place and into another. Could be any alley, really, any time, until you look up.

The alley narrows, and they stop on the threshold of a half collapsed doorway buttressed with beams and two-by-fours. There's no door. A stairway leads up into the dimness and all around them there's the stink of human waste and rotting garbage. But that's not new either, and all Tom registers is that the smell is stronger here, and stronger still as they head up the stairs. He can't see much. Once it had been an apartment building, not grand by any means but nothing like the squalor it's become. Sheets hanging over doorways, or plywood standing up as a weak barrier. Up one flight and then the other, and while he doesn't see anyone he hears the squawk of a baby, pots clanging somewhere, two people yelling at each other in harsh, unintelligible tones. The floor under their boots is wet and slick. He doesn't want to see what with.

One more flight, and then at the end of the hall there's another curtained doorway to which the man appears to be making. They follow, he pulls it aside, and instantly the background stink of the rest of the building is smothered in an entirely new smell. It's not as familiar, but Tom knows it.

Sickness. Death.

He covers his mouth and nose with his hand as they step inside the room, and dimly he can hear Mike trying not to retch. Florence is the steady one, ignoring it as a distraction and moving forward towards the shape huddled on the floor, barely recognizable as human under a pile of blankets. He hears rasping breathing. The room itself is small and dingy, piled high with scavenged and broken furniture, all useless now. Ragged cloths hang in the windows, increasing the dimness. Off to the left he can see a tiny kitchenette. But none of that seems to matter. The air in the room, the light itself, is all being sucked towards the form under the blankets, as if she's drawing it in with each pained breath.

The man bends and pulls back the blanket.

The woman is small, emaciated, and even in the dimness Tom can see that she's deathly pale. She drags in another ragged breath before she manages to turn her head, coughing violently into a basin on the floor, and it's then that Tom sees what's in it.

It's red, dark, congealing. What's coming out of her mouth is a brighter red, somewhere between sputum and vomit, and thick. When she falls back onto the blankets again and stares dully up at them, Tom sees that the whites of her eyes are no longer white but a shocking red. Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth and she moves her lips as though she might be about to speak but she doesn't.

There's a point at which horror becomes a kind of entrancement and he could be there now, as he bends towards her, trying to see her better. But Mike is dragging him back, Mike and Florence together, dragging him in a stumbling rush towards the door and through the curtain and down the stairs, heedless of the man's outraged yells. It isn't until they're out the front door and stumbling down the alley that Tom manages to open his mouth to ask what's happened, but he's cut off entirely as Mike leans suddenly against the wall and vomits. He's not sure he's ever seen that. So he watches dumbly, Florence's hand still on his arm.

Finally Mike pushes away, wiping roughly at his mouth and shaking his head. "Let's go. We need to go."

"Why? Pinocchio—what was that? What did she have?"

Mike is pale. That's new, too. He's never seen Mike pale like this.

He's never seen Mike this obviously terrified.

"Look." Mike reaches out and closes his hand on the front of Tom's shirt, holding him but not dragging him closer. Tom feels Florence release him and step away. "We have. To get out of here. Now. No questions."

Tom nods again, and Mike releases him, and they move back down the alley, as fast as they can without running. Somewhere up in the buildings over them, a woman is dying. And Florence had left her. There's only one circumstance under which he can think that Florence would do that.

And that's if there's nothing she could do.

He shivers faintly, half trips over Dexter but manages to hide it. By the time they get back to the car the sun is close to setting, and they still haven't eaten.

 

-2-

'Out' turns out to mean out. Way out. Mike drives like a madman the second he gets behind the wheel and they bounce over debris and potholes, and Tom imagines that the people by the side of the road are looking accusingly at him. _Leaving so soon? Got somewhere to be? Look at you go, look like you've seen a ghost._

A ghost. That woman... there are no ghosts here but there are shades and echoes. He shivers again. His headache is worse, and now after the sight of food there's a gnawing emptiness in his stomach. Dexter licks gently at his face and he pushes him away.

He knows better than to ask any questions now. They ride in silence. Once, as they break out onto a old country road, Florence leans forward and gives his shoulder a quick squeeze.

The trees bend over them like long skeletal hands in the twilight. It's winter, but it's a dead winter, without snow or even any real cold to speak of. Further north, he knows it's not like this; he'd shivered his way through the down months of last year. But there's something wrong with the landscape here. Something's been done to it.

When they finally stop for the night the shivering is more than an occasional thing, and there's a voice in his head that it's becoming hard to ignore. _You're sick, buddy. Getting sicker. Let her know now and she can do something for you._

Unless she can't. It's hard to not think that way. How close to the woman had he got before Mike had dragged him back? How much of that poisoned air had he pulled into his lungs? Is he going to start to bleed?

But he'd had the headache before. But it doesn't matter. He steps out of the car under the fleshless trees and looks up at the sky, the last of the daylight, before Mike punches him in the shoulder—more lightly than he might otherwise have done—and tells him to stop fucking daydreaming and look for some firewood.

They eat squirrel, that night. Two between the three of them, and the meat is stringy and full of gristle but he chokes it down even as his appetite rebels. Florence gives him a significant look. Does she know? He turns away from her, drops a piece of meat onto the ground by Dexter's paws. The sky is still overcast so there's no moon, no stars. Tom huddles further into his coat and wishes he were asleep, except that he's afraid to dream, because he's afraid of those staring red eyes.

Out of the darkness, Mike speaks. He's eaten hardly anything, staring dully into the fire, and his voice has an equally dull quality of acceptance to it.

Or maybe that's just what Mike sounds like when he's frightened.

"You're not coughing yet," Mike says. "That's a good sign."

Tom looks up, squinting at him. Even in the dimness of the fire the light seems much too bright. "You still haven't--" He glances over at Florence, as if she might tell him something. "What _was_ that?"

Mike sighs and stirs at the fire with a stick. After the sigh there's nothing and Tom's about to give any possibility of an answer up for lost when he speaks again.

"Our code name for it was Project Pale Rider. Pale Horse was the actual virus. It had another name, but no one called it that and I don't remember it now."

Tom stares at him. So... he'd known, the second he'd seen Mike's face, he'd been sure that Mike had known what it was. So this is how. He feels something in him darken and sink, and he looks at Florence again, but she's only looking back at him with grave eyes. She knows too, he senses. Whether Mike told her before or whether it's just one of those things she knows. And once again he's so out of the loop, and finding it hard to keep from resenting it. Maybe he'll always feel a little like an outsider with them.

"This is when you were working for Santiago?"

Mike nods, once. Overhead, as if in some kind of clichéd response to the name, a bird screams.

"I was just in charge of the project. Had to report to him, but it's not like I was up on any of the science. All I know is what they told me." He pauses and takes a breath. "All I know is bad.

"It's a slate-wiper. Ninety-nine percent kill rate. They told me only rabies is that good." He laughs hollowly, reaching up to dig the heel of his palm into his eye, and just for a moment Tom wonders what exactly it's like to walk around with the shit Mike Pinocchio carries in his head. "I don't know anything about the genetics side of it, but if you wanna know what it does, imagine Ebola crossed with Spanish Flu."

"Jesus." And that's all he says. He's having a very hard time taking it in, and the pounding behind his eyes isn't making anything easier. He was in a room with that thing. They all were. That looming monster that he sensed but never saw directly until she looked up at him with that red gaze. He's been near sick people before, and maybe it's his own hazy, increasingly dreamlike perception of the world, but this is something entirely new.

Mike is staring into the fire again, and Tom has to watch him a long time before he blinks. "In the end we never deployed it. We couldn't make a vaccine. No way to protect our own men."

"And now it's out."

"And now it's out." Mike looks at him, and what Tom sees in his eyes makes him want to look away. He's sometimes wondered what he'd do if he ever had to see Mike truly giving up. "I dunno how. Don't suppose it really matters."

Tom stares down at his hands, the shadows of the fire moving over them and making them look twisted and as skeletal as the trees. He's trying to figure out what exactly this means, trying to parse it out. A slate-wiper. Out. In the population, and with that kind of overcrowding and poor sanitation it's just a matter of time before it spreads.

But then something tugs at him and he looks up, frowning. Beside him on the ground, Dexter apes the movement.

"That woman... she was dying. But her husband wasn't sick. We didn't hear about anyone else who was sick." He pauses, teetering on the edge of the words. "I'm not sick." _Liar._

Mike stares at him for a long moment. "It mutates," he says finally. "That was part of the problem. If it's out, maybe it's changed. The way it works."

"Better?"

Mike answers in an entirely noncommittal shrug, and Tom sees how the question is stupid. Something like this, there's no such thing as 'better.' It's there and you're fucked or it isn't and you aren't.

"So what do we do now?"

Mike pokes moodily at the fire but otherwise he doesn't answer immediately. Florence only spares him a glance, a subtle look of sympathy, before she goes back to whatever counsel she keeps. Now, as so many other times before, she'll let Mike decide, and she won't intervene unless she feels she has to.

"I dunno." He pauses again, chewing at something. A piece of gristle. His tongue. "We keep moving. Get as far away from the area as we can."

Tom blinks. "That's it?"

"Yeah, that's it. What, you got a better idea?" He gives Tom a look and his eyes narrow. "You think we can actually _do_ something about this? I told you, we got no vaccine. There _is_ no vaccine. No treatment, either. Nothin'."

"What about Florence?"

Mike waves an impatient hand. "We thought of that back when we were making it. She can't do anything to it."

The bird screams again, nearer, and Tom is no longer sure it's a bird. A small animal, maybe. Something in pain. Do animals in pain scream? Or do they just slink off into hiding and wait for health or death? He read something about that once. He doesn't remember.

"We just left her." He pulls further in on himself. Dexter looks up at him, whining softly. All the death, all around him, and it feels like things are racing toward some kind of breaking point. He's been here for three years now and he's starting to forget what it feels like to be anywhere else. He was never in theater for this long. This isn't a theater, and it isn't a game. It's real, whatever Mike says, it's real and it's killing him. "We just left her there."

"Hobbes--" The world is starting to spin, and through the slow whirling he sees Mike leaning over, reaching for him with sudden concern on his face, but he feels strong hands on him and he knows Florence has gotten to him first. He pitches forward, is caught, lowered gently backward to the ground. Muzzily he hears Mike say "Jesus Christ, he's burning up," and he thinks _They were wrong, I've got it, I've got it and I'm going to vomit up my insides and die._ He feels the cold wetness of Dexter nosing at his face and then he doesn't feel or hear or think anything else at all.

 

-3-

It's still dark when he opens his eyes again, and for a moment he's not sure he's opened his eyes at all. Not sure where he is, not sure if he's even alive or if this is whatever comes after, but gradually the world drifts back to him and penetrates and he hears night sounds, the quieter sounds of winter, and he feels Dexter's warm little body at his side, a blanket covering them both. A few feet away, the dying coals of the fire are still glowing. He flits his gaze to the side of the fire and sees Florence's sleeping face, and he flits his gaze to the other side and there's Mike, sitting up and looking at him. There's still no stars, or moon, and but for the coals he would have no idea how much time has passed.

He moves his lips soundlessly, suddenly aware of his own dry mouth, and Mike leans over, uncaps a canteen and holds it to his lips. He drinks, and drinks some more, and usually he tries to only take what he needs but whatever's happened to him has removed that inhibition and made him greedy. He half expects Mike to berate him for it. Mike looks on and says nothing.

When he's done he pushes the canteen weakly away and licks his lips. "What happened?"

"You were sick," Mike says simply. Tom can't tell if he's annoyed or not. "Florence fixed you up. Were you gonna tell us about that at some point, by the way, or were you just gonna let us drag you around until you keeled over?"

"Was gonna..." He coughs lightly and feels a twinge of panic as he does--_You're not coughing yet, that's a good sign_\--but it's just his own dry throat, raw in spite of the water he's drunk. "Was scared." Because it's true and he's too tired to lie about it.

A flash of something that might be understanding moves across Mike's face. "You thought you had it." Again, Tom expects to be berated, or at least mocked, but Mike only shakes his head. "Different symptoms. You'd have a fever, but you'd start coughing too. It always starts with coughing. I dunno what you had, but it wasn't Horse."

The way he's talking about it... Tom shivers under his thin blanket and it doesn't have anything to do with the cold or any sickness left in him. "Pinocchio. Did you ever... did you test it on people?"

Mike looks away into the coals, his expression unreadable. "Yeah."

"Jesus."

Mike turns to look at him again, and when their gazes meet Tom sees something there that he doesn't know how to classify. Regret, it's like. Apology. Sympathy. He can almost hear it. _I know you feel like you should hate me._

Does he?

"They weren't people to me, then." He smiles a little, thinly, looking down at nothing. "Just VC. You tell yourself it doesn't matter what happens to them." And it's strange to hear Mike talk like this, because he's always acted like he _doesn't_ think it matters. Like there's no reason to care.

But there's Florence.

"Is that why you left?" The question is more direct than he usually dares, more bold, but there's something delicate and fragile about the air tonight, a feeling of something long-closed that's finally able to open just a crack. Just enough to let some light in. And Mike doesn't sneer, doesn't shoot back with a sardonic remark. He's quiet for a moment, seeming to consider.

"Not totally," he says finally. "But maybe it was part of why. It was a lot of things."

It's not much of a detailed answer, but it's more than Tom ever expected, so he accepts it without any other question. All that really matters is contained within it, he senses. It was a lot of things. Just like that. He pulls the blanket closer around his shoulders and closes his eyes again. "How late is it?" Because _what time is it_ doesn't have a whole lot of meaning here anymore.

"After midnight, probably. You were out a few hours."

"I can take second watch."

Mike snorts a laugh. "Second watch, hell. You can sleep, dick. You need it."

It's a kindness, though a kindness delivered in a uniquely Mike manner, and he accepts it gratefully. A full night of sleep is a luxury now and one he doesn't often get. Dexter sighs against him and snuggles closer. He's tired, bone-weary. He's tired in a way he's not sure he has any right to be when they've just left a woman to die horribly, with God knows how many others to follow. They could be standing on a precipice.

That isn't exactly new.

Tired doesn't know ethics. He feels himself plummeting back towards sleep, but just before he hits bottom, he thinks he hears himself whisper "And I don't hate you."

He has no idea if Mike hears him or not. He's gone after that.  


* * *

  
When he wakes again the sun is up, hazy and greased by clouds like the day before. He blinks and sits slowly up, groaning to himself and looking around with bleary eyes. He doesn't feel sick anymore, but the muzzy-headedness hasn't completely gone yet, and the last day feels almost like a bad dream.

If only he could believe that's all it had been.

Florence is stirring the ashes of the campfire with a stick, knocking down the last remaining coals. She pauses, looks up at him, spares him a small smile. Goes back to the fire. Tom yawns and rubs his eyes. He knows it can't be long after sunrise but he has the thick, logy feeling of having slept far too late into the day.

"Where's Pinocchio?" Because he's nowhere to be seen. Florence inclines her head off into the trees but otherwise offers no explanation. Tom's curious, but if Florence doesn't see fit to try to explain, an explanation must not be all that important. He shoves off the blanket and reaches over for the canteen, spilling a small amount into his hands and scrubbing at his face, sparing a little more for rinsing out his mouth. He has a toothbrush. Somewhere.

Hygiene is just something else that he only gives a cursory thought to anymore. He stopped smelling himself a long time ago.

Someone lightly cuffs the back of his head, making him cough sharply. "Quit wasting water, dick." And there's Mike again, moving past him and scooping a few remaining loose items into his pack.

Tom glares up at him. "There isn't any around here?" Even when they can't find food, water usually isn't so hard to come by. But Mike glances at Florence and then shakes his head.

"Not here. Not potable."

"Not even if we boiled it?"

Mike sighs. "Big chemical plant went boom about five miles from here, a few years back. All the groundwater's fucked. So no, not even if we boil it. Not unless you like cancer."

He has no answer to that. What kind of answer could there be? For three years this has been happening. Fact, bald and inarguable fact, and he has to accept it no matter how much he might want to deny it. He looks up at the trees again, out at the landscape and the wrongness he'd sensed in it yesterday, which he hadn't been able to articulate even to himself. The deadness in the trees that seems to extend far past any winter.

He's hungry and Dexter is whining softly, nosing at the ashes. They're all hungry. He hoists up his own pack, the blanket under one arm, and walks to the car. If code defines this world, if code can be manipulated and rewritten, they should be able to conjure food out of thin air.

In the car he falls asleep again. In three years Mike has never once let him drive, so it's not a problem. He leans his head against the mesh, the metal webbing pressing lines into his cheek, and he dreams about Sophie. He hasn't written her a letter in months. There just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point anymore. He tells himself that soon enough, he'll be back with her and he can forget about letters forever. He tells himself that. It's a nice thing to try to believe.

In his dream Sophie is standing in their living room and holding that white dress to her bare breast, and behind its starched lines he knows her naked body is warm and inviting. He steps closer to her, feeling a wicked little smile pulling at his mouth, but a red droplet hits the pristine white of the skirt and trickles downward. He raises his eyes to her face and her beautiful lips are smeared crimson, and her eyes are blood red, and when she opens her mouth she coughs a bloody spray that spatters across his face.

He opens his eyes. They've bounced through a dirty puddle, and his face is wet from the splash. He wipes at it, fights down a wave of nausea. His dreams should be safe. He should at least have them untouched.

Red.

He shakes his head and glances back at Florence, looking out at the world with her face calm and inscrutable. He's never understood how she does it, whether it's simply that this is all she's ever known, whether her nature is just to accept. She doesn't fight. She flows. She bends. She works around things, while Mike alternates guile and brute force. Now and then he sees, clearly, how and why they work.

But it's still a mystery.

_Red._ Beating at the back of his mind, no matter how hard he tries to keep himself from thinking of it. He shudders and turns his attention back to the road in front of them, and approaching from the horizon are the low buildings of what looks like a small village. But it doesn't have that populated look so instantly recognizable even in the ruins of a place. It looks dead and long-abandoned. He glances at Mike, questioning.

"Are we stopping?"

Mike's mouth tightens. "Got to. We need food and squirrel ain't gonna cut it too much longer. Besides, not sure I'd want to eat them anyway." They had the night before, and Tom now recognizes that as necessity. He's seen no deer here, he realizes. Nothing large but people. This is not really like anywhere else they've ever been. At least in New York City the damage had been clear and obvious, the cause the same.

He's seen lots of little towns like this in the midwest: one main street, intersecting with another a few side streets in between houses. Even in the Real World they'd been starting to die. No future, not much work, kids getting bored and leaving home, going to college and never coming back. Not like this, though, and as they get closer he starts to see disquieting things. Some of the windows still have intact glass. One screen door flaps open in the breeze, knocking gently against the frame. A tricycle sits abandoned in an overgrown front yard.

None of those things in themselves is so strange. But the windows... He's not sure about the windows. And there's more, more that doesn't have anything to do with what he can see. After three years he's learned to trust new senses and they're gently warning him now.

About what?

He can feel the tension in Florence, and when he glances backs he's sitting forward, her hand on her gun. Mike, too, jaw set as they move slowly down the street. But there's no obvious reason to run and the need is too great.

They stop at the intersection. It seems like the place; residential gives way to a tiny commercial district, stores with more smashed-out windows, so ubiquitous they're not even disturbing anymore. Looted a long time ago. But there might be something. Mike pulls the car to the side, partially shielded by a wall. The upper windows of the building across the street look like blank, empty eyes—cliche, but maybe that's why Tom can't keep the image away.

There's a stoplight in the middle of the intersection, fallen from the wires overhead. It's just sitting there, half-smashed but otherwise apparently undisturbed from the moment at which it fell. Tom stares at it for a second before Florence touches his arm gently and they move off.

The first store is a drugstore, and while a few bottles of vitamins and tubes of old toothpaste dot the white metal shelves, it's otherwise been picked clean. In a corner lies a vending machine, its front wrenched open and every can of soda gone. In a small pile next to it, like some kind of congealed bodily fluid, are quarters, dimes, nickels. A few bills. Money is useless now. It only had any value while everyone believed that it did. Money isn't sugar.

Mike makes a short dissatisfied noise and they move on.

Across the street is a small grocery store, and as they enter it, stepping through the front window and over shattered glass, Tom feels his already empty stomach sink. There won't be anything here. This is the first place anyone would go to. And indeed, as they stare out over the aisles, the shelves look absolutely bare. There's a faint, sweet smell of decay, but it's only residual; whatever was going to rot probably did so a long time ago.

"C'mon," Mike mutters, his tone conveying only _let's get this over with,_ when they hear something in the far left aisle drop and roll. A can or a jar, it sounds like, and although all three of them freeze instantly with guns drawn, Tom feels a sliver of hope. If there's one can of something left there might be more. Mike would tell him that it's too good to be true.

Mike is usually right about things like that.

"Come out," Mike barks into the dimness. "Hands where we can see 'em."

There's no response, but there is a faint scuffling sound, and Tom meets Mike's gaze for a second, both questioning. Tom mouths _animal?_ but just as he does there's more movement and a low, hulking shape appears behind one of the checkout lanes.

"Hey," Mike calls. "_Hey._ Stop _right there._"

The shape doesn't stop. It doesn't even seem to have heard them. It's definitely human but besides that it's unrecognizable. It's cradling something in its arms, and it shuffles forward towards them, head down.

And it coughs. Hard, wet. Tom hears something spatter onto the ground and he's already thinking _oh god oh god no_ when the light finally hits it just as it raises its head and it's a man, bearded, long stringy hair, face pale and beard matted with blood.

He opens his mouth, looks directly at them with filmy red eyes and coughs again, and it doesn't spray, not like in Tom's dream. It trickles, and then there's a chunk of something, something that Tom doesn't look too hard at. He's frozen, rooted to the spot. Later he'll be embarrassed about it; Mike still gives him shit for being green but it's been three years, more than that in the service, and he _doesn't freeze like this._

"Hobbes, _fuck,_" Mike yells, and then there's a shot, oddly muffled, or maybe that's just Tom's ears. The man drops like a stone, flickers, goes out in a flare of blue light. On the bloody floor is what he'd been carrying in his arms.

On the floor is a baby wrapped in the rags of a blue t-shirt, a baby that can't be more than a few months old.

"God," Tom whispers. "Oh, God." Florence takes his arm, shakes her head slowly and sadly as Mike steps forward with a face so ashen he almost resembles the dead man. Tom looks long enough to see the baby's dull red eyes, a bloody spit bubble on its lips, and he looks away when Mike raises his gun again and fires.

 

-4-

"Why aren't any of us _sick?_"

Tom is standing in the middle of the road outside of town, standing where he'd stopped in his pacing when the question became too much to contain. Mike leans wearily back against the hood of the car, arms crossed. Florence looks up from where she's crouched by the side of the road, mild concern washing over her face. They're stopped here because going on had seemed like a joke, and because a next move has to be decided on, even if that feels like a joke too.

"I wanna know, Mike. If this thing spreads through the air--"

"It doesn't."

Tom snorts a laugh, high and bitter. "Right, you would know that. What the fuck else do you know?" When he closes his eyes he sees the baby, the red spit bubble, the lax dying face.

Mike eyes narrow and his pale face seems to get just a little more pale. "Are you accusing me of something? You think that's a good idea right now?"

"I don't know _what_ a good idea is right now." He's not sure when he was last so angry. If he is angry. He's not sure how much of the anger is actually fear. There's a lot he's not sure about, and that's part of the fear.

He's not sure about this. He's not sure about Mike. He's usually so sure about Mike. It's like losing the north. Like the entire magnetic field might flip over on him.

"You _know_ about this. I don't even know how much you know. What the fuck do you expect me to feel like? We killed--" He stops, leans over, rests his hands on his thighs and just tries to breathe. "We killed..."

_You killed._

He feels a light touch on his back and he knows without straightening up that it's Florence. He can feel the calm seeping in through his skin, clearly external. She doesn't just heal wounds with her touch. He lets himself breathe, and gradually the tightness in his chest dissolves. When he stands upright she keeps her hand on his shoulder and gives him a look that seals what she's already done. Gentle and firm. _Get a hold of yourself. This isn't helping anything._

_Okay._

When he looks at Mike again Mike is looking away, arms still crossed and his teeth worrying at his bottom lip.

"It's spreading. Isn't it?"

Mike shakes his head. "We've seen three people with it. I dunno if I'd jump to that."

"Three people in two days, Pinocchio. Miles apart. What the fuck do you call that?"

"Why the fuck am I supposed to call it _anything?_" Mike drops his arms, voice rising abruptly, and finally Tom can see the fear, the confusion, and under it the guilt. He feels a little relieved. This is easier to deal with, even if Florence's injected calm is melting out of the air. This is something he can relate to. "I'm not a fucking _expert,_ Hobbes. I know a little more than you do. I don't know what the fuck is going on here. I don't know what's happening. Get it? _I don't know._"

For a few seconds they simply face each other in the pitted road, jaws set and gazes locked. Florence tosses her arms skyward in frustration, turns and begins cutting out across the field away from them and the car, her gun swinging over her shoulder.

Mike turns to watch her go, huffs a sigh and drops back against the car again. "Now look what you did."

Tom glares at him. "It's not my fault."

"No, I guess it isn't." Mike swipes both hands down his face, exhaling heavily. It's not just fear. He looks tired, more than Tom has ever seen him look. He drops his hands and raises his head again. "You think I got answers. I don't. I got no answers, Hobbes. I left because I had no answers."

Tom doesn't have anything to say to that. So he says nothing, looking away, stubborn. Confused. Something's changed in the last couple of days and Mike is talking to him in ways he hasn't ever before.

Florence has stopped, standing a few hundred yards away with her head lifted to the hazy sky, as if watching or looking for something. Tom watches her. He'd like to be with her, feel that calm again.

"So now what do we do?"

"Not sure I got an answer for that either." Mike closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, as though he has a headache. "We gotta keep moving." They always have to keep moving. "I guess... look, we head back north and east is what we do."

Tom looks sharply at him. North and east is where they've come from and they didn't come from there for no reason. "Are you sure? You don't think that might be a seriously bad idea?"

"What other fucking choice do we have?" Mike half-shrugs unhappily, glancing past Tom and down the road into the distance. "We keep going the way we been, it's just gonna get worse. I'm not even talking about Horse. Trust me, Hobbes, New York was nothing."

And that could mean a lot of things. More bombs, more exploded chemical plants, any number of things. He could ask for details. Maybe later. Usually he would be curious, but now he's not sure he even wants to know.

"How're we gonna stay outta trouble?"

"We go careful. We ditch the car when we have to. It's still a big country, Hobbes. Santiago can't be everywhere at once." And that sounds good, but they both know how it's less and less true as time goes on. Santiago's country is growing, the Guard is growing, more and more fence but sooner or later they won't even need a fence anymore.

They're losing. He's known that for a long time now.

"Okay." He sighs and looks away again, and Florence is only a few feet away now. Somehow she's come back without him hearing her. He's a little startled, but not really surprised. She looks at him and then at Mike and nods once. Agreeing. He doesn't know how much she's heard but he knows she's heard enough. "Okay. Let's get going."

"All right." But Mike pauses, a hand on his gun, giving Tom a strange look. "I really don't know anything else, Hobbes. Nothing else we can use."

_Yet,_ Tom thinks. There's a lot Mike might know that he isn't telling, and that's another thing that's not even remotely new. Mike keeps himself to himself and for the most part that's fine. It's only now that it's starting to change.

Along with everything else.

So he just allows Mike a nod, short and not entirely committal, but it'll have to do. He can feel Mike's eyes on him as he follows Florence to the car, opens the door and swings inside. Dexter, dozing on the driver's seat, perks up and jumps into his lap.

It's still another second or two before Mike pushes away from the hood, gets in and starts the car. And then, bumping down the road with the blotted sun beginning to set behind them, he doesn't say anything else for a long time.  


* * *

  
As dusk falls it starts to rain. They swing onto a highway going northeast, the side dotted here and there with abandoned vehicles, some of them only burned hulks. They've clearly been pushed off the road. Someone's cleared it for something else. It's not really a comforting sign, but they stay on it anyway, and they see no people nor any sign of the same. The rain starts and drums on the windshield, and Tom rolls up his window. The air inside the car becomes stale, sour with the odor of sweat and unwashed bodies and clothes. It's been a long time since he had a real shower. He watches the drops trickle down his window in silence, the small droplets at the top, the way they move downward and collect bigger drops on the way, growing in size, moving faster and faster. It's hypnotic. If he were any more tired he might fall asleep.

"We gotta keep moving," Mike says when it starts to become truly dark, and Tom shoots him a questioning look. "We need food. Some kinda shelter." _Water._ Between the three of them they used the last of the canteen hours ago, and that hadn't allowed them any more than a small mouthful each. Tom is thirsty, thirstier than he'd realized until he allows himself to think about it. Mistake. You always ignore things like that if there's nothing you can do about them.

It gets darker, and then darker, and they pick up speed and the sound of rain on the roof doesn't cease or let up. Tom remembers when that sound used to be restful, comforting, lying in bed with Sophie warm against his side. He hopes she still feels that way. He's glad she can't see this.

Eventually he does sleep again, and there's no nightmares, no dreams to speak of at all that he can remember. The hum of the engine, the sound of the rain, the warm little bundle of Dexter in his lap, Mike's silence and Florence's presence, and no matter how frightened he is the calm from before makes its way back into him, aided by exhaustion.

He opens his eyes in a grimy kind of pre-dawn light, and they're still moving. Tom yawns and rubs his eyes, looking around. Unless he missed a stop they've driven through the night. Mike is still awake. Mike has been awake for close to forty-eight hours now. It's not really that remarkable.

Lights ahead. He sits up straighter and Dexter sits up with him, whining softly. Lights... electricity. It's not unheard of, especially not closer to the fence, but it's still worth some notice, some comment. He doesn't remember coming this way, and as they draw closer and the lights take on a kind of shape, he sees something else that doesn't seem right.

Humvees, parked by the side of the road. Crossed swords. "_Shit,_" Mike hisses, pulls the car over so hard and sharp that Tom has to brace a hand on Mike's headrest to keep from ending up in his lap. Dexter actually does end up there, and Mike shoves him off, cursing. Tom peers out the window. Those lights look like giant klieg lights. Familiar.

"What the fuck is going on?"

"I don't know." Mike is peering out too, face a mask of tension. Behind them, Florence sits. Waiting.

"They're not supposed to be out this far yet, right?"

Mike shrugs helplessly. "You got me. I didn't think so."

"Should we get a closer look?" A second after he asks the question he expects Mike to give him an incredulous look, maybe a few choice words about his instincts, but instead there's silence, and when he looks at Mike again Mike is nodding slowly.

"Yeah, okay. We keep a distance. But something's up."  


* * *

  
It's a small cluster of buildings. Not even really a town. A gas station, a store, a couple of houses. But these aren't deserted. They don't have the same feel, but all feelings aside, as the three of them edge up behind one of the houses, it would be pretty clear anyway. There's a small cluster of people in the middle of the road, surrounded by humvees, surrounded by Guardsmen. One or two of them are crouched. All of them are huddled together, clearly terrified. Across the street, the front door of one of the houses slams open and three people emerge, hands on their heads, followed by two Guardsmen with guns pointed at them. Tom glances to the side; a little ways across the back lawn of the house they're crouched behind is a garden, dead for the winter but clearly well-kept.

A little settlement. Not like one of the bigger ones. This is a group of people who have banded together out of necessity and a desire for community, working and living together, sharing everything, watching each other's backs. He's seen it before and each time it's given him a little hope. People like this have fed them, given them shelter out out of pure kindness.

Now they're being rounded up in the middle of the road. Tom swallows hard, fighting down the outrage. It won't help anything.

"Probably nothing we can do, right?"

Mike shakes his head. "No." He pauses, glances at Tom. "Sorry." Mike hardly ever uses that word. But when they've stopped at places like this, Mike's been fed too.

"I still don't get what's happening. This isn't part of the expansion. They'd have a bigger force for that." And they wouldn't have a significant force at all for a place like this. When the Guard expands the borders, the troops are reserved for major population centers. Smaller settlements get taken care of much later. "I count... Jesus, sixteen."

"Eighteen." Mike inclines his head forward; two more Guardsmen emerge from behind one of the houses, guns in hand. "You're right. Why so many? This is fucking weird."

"You wanna get closer?"

Mike thinks for a second, glances back at Florence, who seems to be thinking as well. Tom has seen this a few times; Mike appears at first glance to be making the decisions, but in so many situations there's a kind of quiet deference from him to her. Maybe he'll make the final decision, but he won't make any decision at all without her okay.

In the end she nods and he turns again. "Okay. A little. But Christ, be careful. We still gotta get back to the car and get outta here without getting spotted."

They creep around the side of the house, keeping it between them and the road, and one by one they duck behind a shed that gives them a slightly better view. "We split up," Mike hisses. "Find out what you can, meet back at the car in fifteen. Hobbes." He points off towards the gas station, half lit but outside the brightest circle of light. "You head that way. Florence and I'll go right."

Tom doesn't wait for further instruction and he's too used to Mike giving the orders to question it much. He darts behind a hedge, staying low, circles wide outside the light, crosses the road and doubles back towards the gas station. For all he knows there's a hidden perimeter. But he can't think about things like that, not now.

He has to remember: there's nothing he can do.

From the gas station he has a slightly better view, and he can see that some of the people in the group appear to be in pain. A few of them are kneeling with their hands on their heads, but more of them are doubled over, crouching, holding their middles. Have they been beaten? The binoculars are back in the car. _Shit._ They should have thought to bring them. He slides behind one of the pumps, low as he can be without crawling.

Some of the people are coughing.

"What the _fuck_ is this?" A man is striding into the light, authoritative and tall and it only takes Tom a second to identify him as Mel Waters. _What the fuck, indeed._ "Captain, why aren't these men suited up?"

One of the Guardsmen steps forward. They're not close to the prisoners, and close enough for Tom to hear them clearly. "We were told... it's not airborne."

"Fuck what you were told." Waters is mad. Tom's not sure he's ever heard him this mad. "They're handling the prisoners, they're getting close enough to get infected. You get them in spacesuits, Captain. _Now._ Unless you want them in the circle too."

"Shit," Tom breathes. Infected. More people. Further east and north. This is out of control. If it ever was under control to begin with.

He has to get out. He has to get back to the car. They can't do any more here and he doesn't want to stay to see what happens next. He turns, moves swiftly from the pumps back to the low building, prepares to cross the road again.

A sharp pain across the back of his head, his gun spins out of his hand and he hits the pavement jaw first, biting his tongue. He grunts, almost yelps, but the darkness takes him before he gets much of a chance.  


* * *

  
"Tom Hobbes."

He opens his eyes slowly. His lids feel stuck together. He's sitting on the pavement, his hands are tied behind him, shoulders aching, and half his face feels huge and swollen. He tries to lick his lips, tastes blood, groans.

"C'mon, Hobbes. Rise and shine."

The light is incredibly, painfully bright, and when he lifts his gaze the face of the man crouched in front of him is cast in deep shadow, but when he looks to the side it's clear, and not a surprise. The husky voice had given it away in any case.

"Waters," Tom croaks, and groans again. Better and better.

"Hey, Hobbes." Waters smiles. It's not a pleasant smile. "Anytime anything's going down, you just keep popping up. Don't you?"

"Fuck you." He coughs, spits blood, feels a twinge of pleasure when Waters moves back a little hurriedly. "Think I got it? Want me to cough on you, Waters? You really ought to be wearing a suit yourself, you know that?"

"Major Waters." Waters straightens up and turns, and out of the light comes another Guardsman shoving two very familiar figures before him. "Found these two around one of the houses."

"Fantastic." Waters grins, but Tom notices with a certain satisfaction that he's now keeping his distance from all three of them. "Got a regular goddamn party going, don't we? How you doin', Pinocchio?"

Mike sneers at him and opens his mouth to speak, but he never gets that far.

"Hello, Michael." Tom turns sharply, as much as he can from where he's sitting despite the screaming in his arms, Mike turns as well, and he hears Florence draw in a hard breath.

This changes everything.

Omar Santiago steps out of the shadows of the shed, flanked by two Guardsmen. He smiles. "It's very good to see you again, son. Been a long time."

 

-5-

Mike doesn't say anything. He meets Santiago's gaze with a kind of blankness that Tom is guessing is taking an extraordinary amount of willpower. Santiago looks from him to Waters, smiles again. It's a very pleasant smile. Santiago's always had a very pleasant smile, Tom thinks; it's one of the disarming things about him. A smile like that, it's easy to think that maybe he's right, maybe he really does have the best interests of everyone at heart, especially you. Maybe it would be better if you just went along.

"We're going to have to test your blood. All three of you." Santiago inclines his head slightly, as if this is a regrettable thing, worth apologizing for. "You understand, in this situation... we really can't afford to take any chances."

Three Guardsmen with tiny, blocky looking devices are stepping forward. One of them bends and takes Tom's arm. He considers fighting, but only for a moment. Wait. Watch for a chance. This isn't a good one.

"We haven't been close enough for an expos--_ah._" Mike winces and at the same moment Tom feels a sharp pain in the meat of his forearm, quickly withdrawn.

"It's not that I don't trust you, Michael." That smile again. "Believe me, in this case, I'd trust you. It's just that... well, like I said." One by one the three Guardsmen look up from the devices and nod, and step away again.

"You're all clean. Good. It would be a shame if one of you wasn't salvageable."

"Salvageable for what?" Tom doesn't like the word. He doesn't like any of this, obviously, but if it were a question of getting the three of them out of the way, he's pretty sure that would have been taken care of by now. The fact that he and Mike and Florence are all still alive is suspicious in itself.

"Well." Santiago drops into a crouch, faces Tom squarely. In three years he doesn't seem to have aged at all. "I'm guessing you know about Pale Horse." He glances up at Mike. "I know Michael isn't always forthcoming, but I'm assuming he's told you at least a little."

"Yeah."

"It's becoming... a problem." Santiago folds his hands together under his chin, and looks entirely as if they're two friends discussing this over coffee. "We were hoping that you—you and your friends—might be able to provide us with some assistance in dealing with it."

"You're a long way from home, Omar," Mike says, cutting in before Tom can reply. "You got people to take care of one settlement. Why come yourself?"

"Yes, why," Santiago says, straightening up again. His smile is gone. What's in its place is hard to find words for. Tom has never seen Omar Santiago afraid, and he's not sure it's an emotion the man is even capable of feeling. So this isn't that. But maybe it's somewhere in the same ballpark. "Why would I want to see firsthand the thing that could destroy everything I've spent the last decade of my life working for?"

"What're you gonna do with those people?" Mike's face is grim, set. Tom glances back at them, a sizable crowd, now, huddled together in the growing light of the sunrise, and the Guard around them is now dressed in billowing white biohazard suits.

"The only thing we can do."

Mike sneers. "Right, because trying to help them is completely outta the fucking question."

"We can't help them, Michael. You know that better than anyone else here." Santiago looks to the side, sighs, and Tom almost believes that he's genuinely unhappy about it. "They're dead already."

Tom gives Mike a look, questioning. Mike looks away again. Some of the people in the circle are crying. More coughing. Part of him—maybe the part that speaks in Mike's voice—wishes they'd just get it over with already. The waiting seems pointlessly cruel.

He turns back to Santiago again, straining his neck to look up. "So you want our help... you're saying you didn't deploy it?"

Santiago snorts a brief laugh. "I wish you thought better of us than that. If we'd deployed it ourselves, you'd see it a lot more than a few scattered cases. Besides, what would we gain by that? We have no vaccine."

"That we know of."

"Those men are in biohazard suits. Do you think we would take those precautions if it was as simple as giving them all a shot?"

"I don't know _what_ I think," Tom says. He's tired, his arms are hurting, his face is bruised and so swollen that every move of his jaw is pain. And behind him, ringed by soldiers, are dying people, and there's nothing he can do for any of them. "Why the fuck should we trust you? Why should we believe _any_ of what you're saying?"

Santiago shrugs. "I don't know how you expect me to answer that. You do or you don't. And..." He glances over Tom and past all of them to the circle of people. "If you don't, we may have to figure out something else to do with you." He looks down at Tom again, smiling. "We'll leave you alone to talk it over."

He walks away, flanked by his guard, and the remaining soldier shoves Mike and Florence down hard into the road next to Tom, Florence grunting softly as she hits her knees. Mike turns to her, face showing concern, but she shakes her head. _I'm fine._

"Shit," Mike mutters, pulling at the cuffs binding his wrists. "Well, this is just great. What the fuck do we do now?"

"You tell me," Tom says dully. He would have thought he'd be used to being captured and beaten by now. Maybe that's one of those things you never really get the hang of. "Doesn't seem like they're giving us a whole lot of choice." He thinks about Dexter. Dexter, still back in the car. _If he's taken a piss in there Mike's going to lose his mind,_ he thinks, and in spite of the pain and the awful helplessness he almost laughs.

Mike gives him a look. "What?"

"Nothing. Look, I'm guessing... they want us mostly because of you."

Mike grimaces, sour, and again Tom sees that flash of guilt under the surface. "Yeah, probably. I'm not sure what the fuck I'm supposed to do, though. Like I said, I just oversaw the project. I never understood the science."

"Well, I don't know. But I think we have to say yes. I mean..." He sighs a little fitfully. "Fuck, I hate this. But they're just gonna kill us otherwise."

Mike is quiet for a few moments, thinking. Tom lets him think. It's almost completely light now, and a single bird wheels overhead, dropping down behind one of the houses. It's the first bird he's seen in days. For an instant he's captivated by it, by the life of it against the dead landscape, before it vanishes again.

"Okay, here's the deal," Mike says finally, looking from him to Florence. "This could be one of two things. Either they're telling the truth and they didn't deploy it, in which case we all basically want the same thing, and if we help them... hell, maybe we could save a lotta people."

"Or?"

"Or," and Mike's voice drops slightly as he glances up at the single Guard standing a few feet away, "they _did_ deploy it, and this is some kinda setup that we don't get quite yet. And if that's what's going on, we're in a better situation to find shit out from the inside." He laughs a little and shakes his head. "And if we refuse, we die. So fuck it, I'm with you. I say we say yes."

"For now?"

"For now."

Tom looks at Florence. She looks back, face tight with obvious discomfort. She turns to look at the circle of sick people, something desperate flashing through her eyes. Then, slowly, like it's taking an effort, she nods. It makes sense that she would hate it most of the three of them. Tom feels a flash of guilt and he wishes he could reach out a hand, touch her shoulder the way she's touched him.

"Okay," Mike says quietly, raises his head and yells. "Hey, Waters! Tell your sugar daddy we're in." Waters looks up sharply from where he's talking to a group of Guard, and Tom has to suppress a grin when he sees one or two of them doing the same, covering their mouths with their hands and clearing their throats loudly.

"Like you didn't have your head halfway up his ass," Waters hisses when he gets close enough to yank Mike to his feet. "You two! Get the others on their feet and get them in a vehicle. I want us out of here before noon."

One of the Guard salutes. "Sir. What should we do with the people, sir?"

Waters's mouth thins into a grim line. "Go ahead and execute. Burn the buildings. Make sure everyone's suited and test them before we leave. If any of this follows us home, it's on your head, Captain."

"Sir." The man salutes again, a little less smartly. The Guards holding Mike and Florence shove them hard towards one of the humvees, and Mike almost stumbles.

"Wait." Tom twists around, looking back towards the car. The car. They're probably never going to see it again. "Our packs... And Dexter's back there."

"Dexter?" Waters snorts and rolls his eyes skyward. "You aren't seriously still dragging that fucking mutt around, are you, Hobbes? For Christ's sake, he's not even your real dog."

_He's real enough,_ Tom thinks through a sudden tightening in his throat, and then Mike is standing up straighter, shooting Waters a dark look. "Let us get our shit, you limp dick. And let the boy get his dog."

Tom stares at him, grateful and confused. His pack... his letters to Sophie are in there. His picture of her. He's fairly sure that Mike would have let whatever's in his and Florence's own packs go, if it had been just them.

But it's not.

Waters glowers at Mike, and for a second Tom is sure he'll refuse, but finally he nods to one of the Guard and inclines his head down the road. "Get their packs. And the damn dog."

The cuffs aren't removed, but at least their arms are recuffed in front of them. Dexter leaps up into Tom's lap as he's pushed into the backseat of one of the humvees, the three of them pressed together with Mike in the middle. Mike lets out an exasperated sigh as Dexter yips and licks frantically at Tom's face, but it all stops when the sound of gunfire comes in through the open door. Everything else goes strangely silent. There are no screams, and another short burst of shots, and then nothing.

Florence lets out a long breath, leans back against the seat and closes her eyes. Dexter whimpers softly. When Tom looks at Mike again Mike's gone very pale and he's biting at his lip.

"There was nothing else to do," he whispers, and Tom is sure he's talking entirely to himself. "Right? Nothing else to do."

Tom turns away, holds Dexter close and shuts his eyes against the rising tide of numbness. Nothing else to do.


	2. Infection

-6-

Tom is the only one awake besides the driver when they enter the city. It's kind of a nice change.

They've been driving for a day, into the night, and through another dawn, driving straight through, stops to piss but otherwise going constantly. They've switched drivers once. Mike is deep asleep and has been for hours, his head lolling against Tom's shoulder, and Tom doesn't mind. It's good to have the reminder that he's here, physically attached to all this, because otherwise it would be too easy to start drifting away. None of this feels quite real.

Which is sort of funny. When you think about it.

They passed through the boundary of the fence a long time ago, but between this and the fence there's been a lot of nothing, a few burned remains of houses, and really it's easy to forget about the fence entirely. But not here. He sees the gleaming skyscrapers looming over them and then they're in among them, like slipping into a system of glass canyons. It takes him a few minutes—it's been a long time—but then he places it. He's been here before. In the Real World and in the Realm.

This is Cincinnati.

_Jesus,_ he thinks. _They did this in two and a half years._ And the Egyptians built the pyramids, but what did it cost to get the job done? He's met face to face the men who died to make way for this. He remembers hearing somewhere that history repeats itself but he hadn't realized until that point how true it is.

Their driver makes a left and they head west along a tree-lined street, the branches bare and dead just like everywhere else, but this looks like a healthier kind of dead, the kind that might actually go away with the spring.

"Where are you taking us?" he asks. Beside him, Mike stirs a little and mutters something. The driver meets his eyes briefly in the mirror but doesn't answer. Young kid, can't be more than twenty, barely looks old enough to shave, and the Guardsman in the passenger's seat is much the same. Tom remembers commanding men like that. He remembers being a man like that. This isn't one of the soldiers hijacked from the Real World. This is homegrown meat.

He shrugs and turns his attention back to the world going by outside the window. Commercial district. Office buildings, coffee shops and bookstores, trees in neat little squares of dirt and benches next to them, quiet, hardly anyone around. It's too early yet. If he tried to induce a kind of amnesia in himself, he could almost believe that this isn't the Realm at all. He could almost believe he's home.

Another few minutes and they pull up through a gate and into a semi-circular driveway, stopping in front of a building that looks like it could be a mansion or a government building or some kind of museum. In its old life it might be any of those. Now he recognizes it for what it is: a headquarters. It's the kind of place he knows Santiago likes. Elegant, unmilitary. as much a grand residence as anything else. Whatever else the man might like to believe about himself, he has the tastes of a dictator.

The driver gets out, followed by his companion, and then they're both swinging open doors and lifting their rifles. Tom glances behind them and sees more humvees pulling up. So this is it.

"Out," the driver says, and gestures with the rifle. "C'mon, wake them up and get moving."

Tom glares at him, bends over and gives both Mike and Florence a gentle shake. Florence is awake instantly, catlike, with no real evidence that she's been asleep at all. Mike wakes with a groan and an attempted swat in Tom's direction, only to be stopped by his cuffs. This seems to bring him back up to speed and he gives Tom a single dismayed look before he steps out of the humvee, as though he's realizing it all over again.

A final humvee pulls up alongside them, and Tom isn't surprised in the least when Santiago steps out of the back and surveys the three of them with his hands clasped behind his back and a satisfied expression on his face. "Gentlemen." He inclines his head graciously toward Florence. "And lady. You'll be staying here as our guests for the time being. I'm afraid your movements will have to be somewhat... restricted, but I trust we'll be able to make you very comfortable." He nods up the wide flight of steps leading to a terrace, and, presumably, the front door. "My men will show you to your rooms."  


* * *

  
It's deja vu all over again. Even the decor is the same, the same dark carpet, the dark wood, the tastefully patterned off-white wallpaper. "Christ," Tom whispers, leaning in close to Mike as they're marched down the hall. "Does he have one of these everywhere he goes?"

And Mike doesn't answer, but he grins, clearly amused, and Tom feels a little better.

The Guard walking with Florence stops abruptly outside one of the doors lining the hallway and produces a keycard, sliding it into the lock. The door clicks open and he pushes her inside, not ungently. Mike and Tom glance back at her, but one of the Guard escorting them touches Tom's shoulder and nods down the hall. _Keep moving._ Tom catches Florence's gaze one last time and complies. He has to trust they'll see her again. He has to trust a lot of things right now, things he never would at any other point. Necessity is a bitch.

Down the hallway, a right turn into an identical hallway, and one of the Guard pulls Mike to a stop in front of another door. Tom pauses, the same look he'd exchanged with Florence, and Mike nods. "Don't worry. I'll see you."

Right.

His own room turns out to be the next one down, which gives him a feeling of greater comfort than he'd willingly admit to. He steps inside, Dexter trotting at his heels, looks around, and this, too, is exactly the same as before. It might be the same room. There's no banquet laid out on the table, but otherwise it's identical, richly furnished, a kind of luxury that's existed only as a dream and a memory for a long time now.

His mouth twists sourly. Years ago he'd hated the part of himself that had been tempted by it, and he hates that part now. He turns and looks at the Guardsman, standing against the closed door and watching him with undisguised interest.

"What?"

The man clears his throat and looks down at Tom's boots and a little to the left. "Sir. I apologize, sir."

Tom stares at him. This is the man who'd herded him out of the car with a gun only ten minutes or so ago. "Why the fuck are you calling me 'sir'?"

"Sir." The man falters slightly, seems wrongfooted, and Tom feels a bizarre urge to try to set him at ease. He's so young. He's not sure he's ever seen a Guardsman so young. "We were... instructed to treat you and your friends with all courtesy. Sir." He clears his throat.

Tom blinks. "O...kay." He turns and looks around the room again. A front room, an ornately upholstered couch, a couple of plush armchairs, a large television. Side tables, the same dark wood as everywhere else. Off to the right he can see a dining room, a small table and four chairs. To the left, it looks like it could be a bedroom, though the door is shut. The entire place has the comfortable but faintly sterile feel and smell of a hotel suite. He doesn't think anyone's lived in these rooms in a long time, if ever.

Dexter snuffles around, trots off into the dining room and vanishes.

"So... what now?" Tom scratches the back of his head. This is feeling more and more surreal all the time. "Am I waiting for something?"

"Sir, a technician will be in to see you shortly."

"A technician?" He's not sure he likes the sound of that. "What for?"

The Guard clears his throat again and looks straight ahead. "You'll be briefed when she arrives, sir."

"Okay, seriously." Tom rubs a hand down his face and sinks into one of the armchairs. "Quit it with the 'sir'ring. It's freaking me out. My name's Tom. Call me Tom. Or Hobbes, or whatever the hell you want." He looks up, and the young man looks more wrongfooted than ever. "You got a name at all?"

"Si--" The man stops, licks his lips, and Tom could swear he hears the *click* in his head as something switches tracks. "It's. Hitchins. Hobbes."

"Okay." Tom smiles, and he tries to make it encouraging. But he's tired, he's hungry, despite the rations they'd been given on the road, and more than anything he'd like to be out of here, Pale Horse gone, none of this ever happened. So many people dead in the past few days and he can't even wrap his brain around it. Lots of people have died in the last three years. It hasn't ever been like this.

But he smiles. Encouragingly. "Okay. I guess now we're getting somewhere."  


* * *

  
The technician turns out to be a middle-aged, almost matronly woman in an olive green uniform that makes her look more like a kind of nurse than anything else. Tom looks up as Hitchins stands aside and she enters, a small black leather pouch held in one hand. "Tom Hobbes." She holds out her free hand and Tom takes it instinctively. "I'm Georgia. They said I'm giving you a chip?"

"Wait a second." Tom pulls his hand away, gets to his feet, takes a few steps back. He never agreed to this. But as he thinks it, he realizes, what he's agreed to already doesn't give him a whole lot of control in any other areas. Still, his jaw sets stubbornly. "They didn't say anything about that to me."

"Well, it's standard procedure," Georgia says patiently, unzipping the case. She seems entirely unfazed. "Everyone gets one. You can make this easy now and go along, or we'll sedate you and give it to you that way. Your choice."

"It's not so bad," Hitchins pipes up from across the room. "It just stings for a second."

"I'm not worried about the _sting,_" Tom says, folding his arms across his chest. "I'm not nuts about some computer somewhere knowing where I am every second of the day."

Georgia laughs, shaking her head. "If that's the problem, I hate to break it to you, sweetcakes, but you deal with that every second of the day already. As far as the chip goes, you let me put it in, you can actually walk out of here, have a little freedom. How's that sound?"

Tom glares at her. "What kind of freedom is that?" But he uncrosses his arms. No point in fighting it. If he resists it'll inconvenience him far more than them, and he has no reason to doubt her about the sedative.

"Give me your arm." Georgia is taking something out of her back, something that looks like a tiny steel pistol. Tom reluctantly holds out his right arm, and she braces it with one hand, aiming the gun at the meat of the inside forearm, under the crook of his elbow. There's a quick punching sound and a flash of pain, and when he looks again all he sees is a small red discoloration, fading even as he watches.

"It's a microchip," Georgia explains, putting the gun back in the bag. "Much more efficient than the old models, much harder to remove on your own. You can now go anywhere you like up to a mile outside the city center. It's a perimeter we set specific to you."

Tom rubs at his arm. It's itching very slightly, even though the redness is almost gone. "And what happens if I go outside the perimeter?"

Georgia smiles sweetly. "The chip releases a tiny dose of neurotoxin into your bloodstream. Nothing lethal, but your motor skills won't be so hot. Basically, don't do it. Save us all the trouble."

There's a knock on the door, sharp and heavy. Hitchins opens it and Mike stalks into the room, followed by Florence, who's looking about as uncomfortable as Tom has ever seen her. Mike is scratching at his arm.

"Don't scratch," Georgia says, glancing over her shoulder as she steps out. Mike shoots her a scowl and keeps on scratching.

"They get you too, Hobbes?" He looks down, sees the tiny mark and makes a face. "Fuckin' A. They've got us screwed. You can't just cut these out like the old ones." He glances back at Hitchins, who is looking at Mike with the same kind of blank wonder, lips slightly parted. "Hey, kid. Fucking beat it. Don't need you anymore."

"I--" Hitchins starts to say, and Mike doesn't let him get any further.

"_Hey._ Raspberry Beret. You speak fucking English? _Out._"

Hitchins doesn't seem to have any reply for that. He stares a second or two longer, turns and shuts the door behind him. He shuts it a little hard.

Tom gives him a look. "You didn't have to talk to him like that."

Mike snorts. "What, is he your boyfriend or something? They've all got _guns,_ Hobbes, did you notice? Did you notice when they were waving them at us?"

"He's just a kid." Tom sighs and drops back into the chair again. There's not a single part of this that he likes. Seeing the Guard from this angle isn't helping any. Not since Escalante... _Shit._ "He doesn't seem so bad."

Mike gives him another incredulous look and flops down onto the couch, still wearing a scowl. Florence stands in the center of the room, looking around uneasily, but she seems to brighten when Dexter trots out of the dining room and sniffs at her boots. She reaches down, scoops the little dog into her arms and strokes his head. But she still doesn't sit.

"So we're stuck here," Tom says, picking at a loose thread on the arm of the chair. "Now what? Can we just... leave?"

"Go outside, you mean?" Mike shrugs. "That's what they made it seem like. I guess it makes sense. If all they gotta worry about is us running off, they probably feel pretty safe right now." He looks down at his arm and his scowl darkens still further. "There's nothing says they'll take these things out when they're done with us, y'know."

Tom drops his hands into his lap. "Nothing says they won't kill us when they're done with us, either. I'm tired, Pinocchio. I don't want to think about this anymore." There's nothing they can do immediately, in any case. And he's wondering more and more about how soft the bed behind that closed door might be.

He doesn't even remember when he last slept in a bed.

Mike's opening his mouth to say something else, when the door swings open and Waters strides into the room, barely sparing the three of them a glance. "On your feet," he says, short and clipped. Tom smiles inwardly. However much he hates this, Waters clearly hates it more. And that's a bit of a plus. "We've got a briefing in five."  


* * *

  
The briefing takes place in a room at the end of a short, wide hallway, continuing the grand hotel feel of the place. The room itself is nothing but warm, honey-colored wood and low, tasteful lighting. In the center of the room is a long table in the shape of a semi-circle, cups and bottles of water at each seat, and the only thing that prevents it from feeling like a corporate boardroom is the crystalline map of America at the far end of the room.

From his seat towards the end of one arm of the semi-circle, Tom looks at it. Starting at the east coast and proceeding southwest, almost a third of it is tinted red. It's not very hard to figure out what it represents.

"Jesus," Mike mutters from beside him. "He really _does_ have one of these everywhere he goes."

One by one, the other seats are filling up. Waters has taken a place at the center of the semi-circle, in what Tom guesses is a place of authority. Scattered here and there are other older men in uniform, talking quietly together, one or two of them casting curious looks in his direction. At the other end of the semi-circle, there's a nervous-looking man in a suit and a tie that he keeps adjusting. He looks profoundly out of place. He looks as though he feels it. He also doesn't look like he's used to the suit.

It's easy to pick out the exact instant Santiago walks into the room. There's no fanfare, no announcement, but everyone falls silent, and those sitting stand respectfully. Tom watches his progress across the room. He doesn't stand. Neither do Mike or Florence. If anyone notices—and he's sure they do—no one says anything. Santiago doesn't even spare them a glance. He stops at the map, regards it for a few seconds as though he's not even aware that there's anyone else in the room, then turns and nods minutely.

Everyone sits.

Santiago clears his throat slightly, looks down at his boots, crosses his arms behind his back. Mike groans softly. "Christ almighty, you fucking ham, get on with it."

"We face a grave threat." Santiago's gaze slowly makes its way around the room, lingering on each person. "It may be that we have never faced a threat of this magnitude since we began our great work. The fact of the matter, gentlemen, is that a weapon we developed years ago has been stolen, and we believe it will shortly be used against us. If it is not being used already." He turns, reaches out and presses a button on the side of the map, and abruptly another map descends. America, still, but this time America spotted here and there with red dots. Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky. Santiago reaches out and points to each.

"Each of these represents one known outbreak of Pale Horse." At the name there's a faint intake of breath, and here and there a quiet murmur. "There may be many more of which we have no knowledge. There is—or was—only one known sample of the virus, and it was held in our possession, under high security. We don't yet know who stole it or how, but the fact remains, it has been stolen." He turns back to the map. "And it has either been inadvertently released... or it is being purposefully deployed."

One of the unformed men speaks, hesitant. "But not against us."

"Uh, not against us." All the heads at the table turn, and it's the man in the suit, glancing down at his papers and shifting uncomfortably in his seat. "We, uh, we think they may be... testing it."

"Testing?"

"On people outside the fence."

"That makes sense." Mike. Tom glances over at him, a little surprised to hear him speak. Surprised to hear him voluntarily contributing anything. He's leaning back in his seat, arms folded over his chest. He knows the attitude. Mike is trying to convince everyone in the room that he truly doesn't give a shit. "Who'd miss them? Who'd care? He's kinda taking a risk, though, doing a field test. When we ran our human trials, we brought them into the lab."

"Why is he here?" Another man, same uniform. Tom is having a hard time telling one from the other. The man is pointing to Mike, a faintly accusing tone in his voice. "He's a traitor. The two with him are known enemies of the state. What possible part could he have in this?"

Santiago raises a hand and the man sits back hurriedly. "Colonel Pinocchio was the supervising officer who oversaw Project Pale Rider during its inception. Since all the consulting staff have died or vanished, he is the one remaining man who might be able to provide some firsthand insight."

Mike smiles thinly.

"And the others?" The man might be chastened, even a little scared, but there's a belligerence about him that doesn't seem to want to quit. Mike shoots him a look, leans over and whispers in Tom's ear.

"Major Frank Edwards. I swear, only reason he's still around is 'cause of how far up an asshole he can get his tongue."

Santiago smiles, but this time it's Waters who answers. "Colonel Pinocchio works... in a team, these days." He says "Colonel" with obvious distaste, pronouncing it as if it's something sour. So Mike had outranked him. Still does. Tom glances at Mike and mouthes _Colonel?_

"If we're finished with the questions, for now?" Santiago's tone is perfectly even, perfectly pleasant, but an almost perceptible chill moves through the room, and complete silence follows. "The plan for now is this.

"Whoever committed the initial theft, we may never know. Nevertheless, it is imperative that we find out who possesses the virus at this point. In addition to this, and perhaps even more importantly, we must succeed where the original project failed. We must develop a treatment."

"A vaccine?" Mike again, shaking his head slowly. "Can't be done. We couldn't even do it with our tame strain in the lab. If whoever stole this has any kinda expertise, who knows what's been done to it by now."

The man in the suit clears his throat, nodding. "Yeah. We know. Which is why we need to obtain a sample."

Mike turns and gives him a hard look. "Who exactly _are_ you?"

Tom looks from one to the other, then catches Florence's gaze, sending an unspoken message. _What's with him?_ He's given no indication since they arrived that he regards the situation with anything other than outright hatred, but the second they'd taken their seats at the table... it's like he's relaxed. Uncurled. Taken control. Like he belongs here.

It's eerie.

"I'm, uh. Sam. Sam McDonald."

"Yeah," Mike says with exaggerated patience. "But who _are_ you?"

The man actually blushes. Tom feels a rush of pity for him. He's used to Mike being... well, Mike, but in this setting, where he's clearly already not on secure footing, it must be a little much to take. "Head of Defensive Technologies. Computer Division."

"And you're here... why?"

"Mr. McDonald has a certain expertise which is relevant to our situation," says Santiago, and Tom hears a subtle thread of warning in his voice. Colonel, sure. But Mike's been away for a long time. However comfortable he might seem, here, this isn't exactly his ground.

Mike nods, sits back readily enough, but Tom catches a look in his eyes that isn't so comfortable, or so relaxed. So maybe it's not that simple. Maybe nothing is.

"So our approach will be double-pronged," Santiago continues. "Our men in the field will devote their efforts toward finding the current holder of the virus, while our operatives here will concentrate on developing an effective treatment."

"And my sample?"

Santiago shoots McDonald a mildly impatient look. "Mr. McDonald, I assure you. You'll have your sample."

The rest of the meeting is devoted to details, the specifics of assignments. Tom tries to pay attention but his mind keeps wandering to the map, to the scattering of little red dots. It looks so neat from this vantage point, so tidy. None of the people here have said anything about the deaths. The suffering. Even Mike. _Human trials._ It was almost easier when Mike was pale and shaken and the entire world seemed poisoned. Suddenly the light wood and low lighting feel obscene. He looks at Florence; for the entire briefing she's been sitting with her head down and her hands folded in her lap, as though she's praying. He wants to apologize to her. For what, he's not sure.

"Fucking Christ," Mike mutters once everyone finally begins to file out. "I forgot how much I hated those things. Did you actually figure out what the hell our job is?"

"I guess we're... consulting," Tom says dully. The corporate boardroom atmosphere extends past the aesthetics. He feels faintly sick. It's all numbers. This is a side of war he never had to see.

This isn't even war. War is more honest.

Mike snorts a laugh. "Whatever. We got nothin' to do the rest of the night, I'm gonna go get plastered on sugar daddy's dollar. You coming?"

"I'm..." Tom shakes his head. "No. I'm going to bed." And maybe he won't dream. Florence glances at him and nods slowly. _I'm with you._

Mike looks at them both for a long moment and finally huffs out a sigh. "Fine. I'll see you both tomorrow." He pushes the chair back, gets to his feet, practically shoves the door open as he walks out.

It feels like a long walk back to their rooms. It's strange on top of strange to walk through these halls unguarded. Free, even if the word is bordered by quotes in his head. It adds to the faintly greasy feeling on his skin, in his head. He needs a long shower. He needs to try to sleep.

They stop at Florence's door and he opens his mouth to say goodnight, but what comes out is "He doesn't even know how he feels about this, does he?"

Florence shakes her head sadly, and once again Tom can almost hear the words in his head. _He's never known how he feels about this._ She lays a hand on his shoulder, and he reaches up and covers it with his own. He feels like he's alone with her in all of this, like all they have now is each other. He sighs.

"Goodnight, Florence."

He walks back to his room alone. It's dark when he enters the front room. He turns on a light, strips off his clothes, heads to the bathroom. The shower is hot and steaming and he stands under it for a few minutes, watching the grime of weeks circle the drain. He should be enjoying it. He's not.

When he figures he's clean enough he turns off the water, towels off, and climbs naked into bed, Dexter leaping up behind him and settling down on his feet. It's a big bed with white linen sheets, soft as he'd imagined it, but he lies there staring into the darkness for about half an hour before he gets up again. There's a robe on the back of the bedroom door—no surprise at all—and he puts it on and heads back out into the front room. His pack is on the floor by the couch and he digs into it, pulling out a battered pad of paper and a pencil. He sinks down onto the couch and licks the tip, thinking.

_Dear Sophie._ Well, that part's easy. He thinks for a few more moments and then bends to the pad again.

_It's been an interesting week._  


* * *

  
He's not sure how late it is when he hears the scuffling in the hall. He looks up from the fifth page of the letter and listens, and beside him on the couch, Dexter lifts his head and listens too. More scuffling, it sounds like something dragging against the wall. A giggle. Then, "Fuck, sorry."

"Shut up." And that's pretty unmistakable. Mike, low and husky. Slowly Tom gets to his feet, even though every instinct in his body is telling him to sit down, go back to bed, anything else. He walks to the door and stops outside it, still listening. He hears a low chuckle, a rustling. It's coming from right outside his door. And then the handle wiggles, wiggles again, and there's a muffled curse.

Tom rolls his eyes. It's obvious. It's absolutely classic. Mike's gone out, gotten drunk, dragged some piece of ass home. It's not like it's nothing he's done before, but usually he hasn't brought the piece of ass in question back to their camp. Tom opens the door, all ready to tell Mike that he's got the wrong room and he should really be more careful.

And he immediately to the left of the door, Hitchins is pressed up against the wall, flushed, gasping with his head thrown back. Mike is moving against him, slow and grinding, hand about as far down Hitchins's pants as it'll go. Tom stares. He doesn't say anything. He's not sure what he would ever say.

"Sir!" Hitchins almost yelps, shoves Mike away and zips up his pants in one sharp motion. "I'm... We just..."

Mike rolls his eyes. "Get outta here, Hitchins." Hitchins doesn't need to hear it a second time. He goes, glancing behind him once, and his ears are a fiery red.

Tom looks at Mike. Mike looks levelly back. And shrugs.

"Wrong room."

Tom stares after him until the door closes behind him. It's another moment or two before he moves. He closes the door, pads back to the couch, sits down and stares at the pad, the paper covered with a message Sophie will probably never get.

Everything that could possibly be wrong with this is wrong.

"Interesting week, my _ass,_" he mutters, and buries his face in his hands.

 

-7-

The ringing phone finally gets him up. He's not sure how long it's been ringing. He didn't actually know he had a phone. He sits up, blinking blearily, and his face feels faintly raw from where the bruised side has been pressed into the carpet. He doesn't remember when he fell asleep. He does remember deciding that the bed just isn't going to work.

Next to him, Dexter continues to sleep, blissfully unaware. Tom feels a bizarre stab of jealousy as he gets up onto stiff legs and heads over to the side table. Dogs don't have to deal with this shit. Dogs can just sleep.

He picks up the phone and holds it to his ear. "What?"

"Hobbes." It's Waters. Tom doesn't actually groan out loud but it's close. Waters is about the last person he wants to hear from right now. "You gonna sleep all goddamn day? You got another briefing. Get your ass up and meet Pinocchio in the hall in ten."

_I don't want to meet Pinocchio in the hall,_ Tom thinks. _I don't really want to meet Pinocchio anywhere ever again, with the images I've got in my head._ "Fine," he says, and slams the phone back into the cradle.

Another briefing. Is that all this is going to be? He sighs and looks around for his clothes, finds them on the floor in the bathroom, but now that he's clean he can actually smell them, and he drops them again with another sigh. The world he's been inhabiting for the last few years of his life doesn't fit here. Not his clothes, and he can't sleep in the bed. He's starting to wonder if he'll be able to eat the food. None of it seems right. It's all very pretty in here and the world outside is broken, collapsing. _People are fucking dying._

People are dying and Mike Pinocchio apparently sleeps with men.

"Fuck," Tom moans, leans over the bathroom sink and lets his forehead hit the mirror. And again. And again, just because.  


* * *

  
He doesn't bother with a shower, but in the dresser in the bedroom, he finds a pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt that just happens to be his size. ARMY. He huffs a single bitter laugh and pulls it on. His boots, at least, he won't compromise on, and there's clean socks in the dresser as well. He splashes some water on his face, decides that'll have to do, and heads for the door.

Dexter whines at his feet. Tom stops, hand on the door handle, and looks down. "Look," he says, sighing. "You can't just come with me everywhere in here. I don't think they'll like it all that much."

Another low whine, and Tom drops down to a crouch and scratches Dexter behind the ears. He wishes he could stay. Or not be here at all. "I'll be back as soon as I can," he says. "Promise. We'll go for a walk or something."

He opens the door and Mike almost hits him in the face, fist raised to knock. "Jesus," he says, dropping his hand and giving Tom a glare before peering past him into the room. "Who the hell were you talking to?"

"I've got the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders in there," Tom says, deadpan. "Sorry, I forgot to tell you." And he turns and heads down the hall, stopping only when he realizes that he's not sure where they're even supposed to be going.

"Dumbass," Mike mutters as he passes him, barely a glance, and Tom feels a twinge of something awful and helpless in his middle. All this shit, only now coming to the surface, and it doesn't seem fair that it all has to be at once. And it's all Mike. Three years. How well can you really know someone? How well can someone really trust you?

Maybe Mike just never trusted anyone. Except Florence.

They walk in uncomfortable silence until they meet Florence, stepping out of her room and wearing clean cargo pants and a plain white tank top. Mike's wearing much the same, a black tee in place of the tank top, everything entirely nondescript and unpatterned except for Tom's sweatshirt, which he's beginning to think was a personal touch on the part of someone. Mike and Florence exchange brief looks, and there's something in it that Tom can't even try to unravel. But he wonders, just how much information changed hands.

Had she known? Has she been keeping it from him, too? He winces, inwardly. This is not the time to start doubting the few friends he has. This might even be a stupid little thing to start doubting them over.

But it doesn't feel little. Or stupid.

"Where are we going?" He looks off down the hall, down the other hall, and wonders how anyone ever finds their way around.

Mike shoots him a glance, sighs. "Remember the pencil neck from yesterday? McDonald or something?"

Tom raises an eyebrow. "Yeah..."

"Got a meeting with him. Basement level two. Apparently we're going to find out what the fuck's so special about his 'expertise'."

It takes them a while to find the right elevators. It's one downside of being allowed mostly free reign of the building, Tom's discovering: no handy escort to show you where to go. When they step inside, Tom's eyes widen slightly; the building seems to extend just as far below the ground as above it, if not further. B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, and a faintly ominous looking BX. Mike pushes B2 and the elevator whirs softly downward.

Tom leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. Nothing like an elevator ride to double the awkwardness of an already awkward situation. Eventually, maybe he's going to have to say something. Eventually. He glances at Florence, looking for some indication of something, but she's standing, staring ahead, and her face is entirely unreadable.

Mike is sticking close to the row of buttons, tapping his fingers distractedly against the metal. Tom can feel the tension coming off him, wonders how much of it might be from the night before, wondering if maybe he doesn't even care and he just has a hangover, but finally the doors hiss open onto a long white hallway lined with frosted plexiglass doors, brightly lit, and he brightens visibly.

"Oh," he says. "Okay. Great. C'mon."

Tom gives him a look, glances back at Florence, who only shrugs. Mike is striding down the hallway as if he knows exactly where he's going, and after a second Tom follows, trotting to catch up. "What're you so pleased about?" Because he supposes that they can't really just not talk to each other.

Mike is glancing from side to side, scanning small placards on the walls by the doors. "He has one of these everywhere he goes." He sees Tom quizzical look and continues. "The building up there, that's just decorated like the main HQ back in Santiago City. It's not the same building, not the same layout. But this..." He gestures around them. "This is a copy. Not sure how he did it, but at least I know my goddamn way around down here."

They head down to the end of the hallway, make a right, and Mike steers them through a door that looks like all the other doors. Tom catches the words on the plaque to the side of it. _Defensive Technologies. Computer Division._

"Right," he murmurs.

As they step through the door there's a cool blue glow and something seems to sweep over them. Tom and Florence stop, looking around, and Florence takes an apprehensive step backward. Mike glances back. "It's just a scan," he says. "Logging the chip. Don't worry, it's harmless."

Florence gives him a doubtful look, but she steps through the doorway, and Tom follows. Again, he feels the utter wrongness of the fact that she's here at all. It's like seeing something caged. She wasn't made for this, wasn't made to go anywhere near it, and she's moving as though she's afraid to touch things, afraid that things might touch her. He's never seen her like this before.

_I'm sorry,_ he thinks, and again he wonders if there's even any way out of this, once they've finished whatever they have to do.

At first glance it looks pretty much like like most computer labs he's ever seen, tables lining one wall with large white terminals, and down a hall and on the right, a series of cubicles. Through a glass partition, he can see a room with a wall of servers dotted with green and yellow lights. There's more halls, leading to closed offices. And there's people. Not a lot of them, and they're all dressed in jeans and nondescript tees. The three of them actually fit in fairly with with the background, except for Tom's sweatshirt and the fact that they actually look as though they've spent a significant amount of time in the sun.

Mike catches a passing woman by the arm. "We're looking for Sam McDonald."

She looks down at his hand as though she's not sure what it is, and nods down the central hallway. "Office at the end. I'm busy?" Mike releases her with a faintly amused expression and she scurries off.

"Still the same," he mutters, and glances around. "Like another fuckin' world. Sometimes I almost miss this."

Tom follows his gaze. "You've worked with them before?"

Mike shrugs. "Kinda, you could say. I used to be one of 'em."

"You... what?" Tom blinks. Mike doesn't seem like the type. Mike seems like the type who would have shoved these people into lockers in high school.

"When I was in the service,"Mike says as they head down the hallway, and he doesn't sound as though he really wants to discuss it. "I took this... course, in computer programming. Turned out to have kind of a knack." He shrugs again, stopping outside the office door. "It was a job. Joined the Guard and never looked back." He knocks.

_Not never,_ Tom thinks, and the door opens. Sam McDonald blinks at them, as though he doesn't immediately recognize them; then comprehension washes over his face. "Oh, right. Hi. You're, uh..." He glances behind them, leans back in and picks up a cup of coffee off the corner of his desk, and Tom gets a glimpse of a cramped office stacked high with papers. "I'm supposed to show you... Right, follow me." He shuts the door behind him and starts off down an entirely different hall to the left, and the three of them follow dutifully. It's all halls, Tom thinks. After years in the open he's just not used to this many hallways. He fights back a wave of claustrophobia. Maybe it's just being underground.

"I thought you were coming later," McDonald says, glancing over his shoulder at them. "I mean, it's not like it matters. I just thought you were coming later."

"We're here now," Mike says, with the same exaggerated patience he'd used in the briefing. "You gonna tell us what this expertise you have is?"

McDonald actually smiles, something Tom hadn't really been able to picture until now. "Yes, I am," he says, and stops in front of another door. This one isn't frosted plexiglass. It's steel, and it looks like it might be reinforced. He bends to a small panel on the wall, and a faint light flashes over his face, followed by a soft *ding*. The door hisses open.

_Retinal scan._ Whatever's in the room, Tom thinks, they aren't messing around with it.

What's in the room, as it turns out, isn't very much. A small computer terminal set onto a table and wired to the wall by a single thick cable. Beside it there's another long table, and hovering a few feet over it is a white sphere about the size of a soccer ball. Tom can see faint lines set into its surface, dividing it up into panels, which look as though they might be able to detach and come away.

Mike looks it over, clearly unimpressed. Or maybe it's a show entirely for McDonald's benefit. Tom isn't sure. He isn't really sure what any of that is about. "Okay, so... you gonna explain what the hell this is, or are we just supposed to know?"

"This," McDonald says with obvious pride, stepping forward and turning to face them, "Is the Optical Scanning and Code Analysis Resolver. But most of us call it OSCAR."

"Code analysis," Mike murmurs. Tom stares at it, like it might explain itself to him. The name hasn't exactly helped much.

"You don't seem like..." McDonald says, looking at all of them in turn, and he looks a little bit puzzled himself, as though he'd expected the name to answer all the questions. He thinks for a moment, then looks down at the cup of coffee in his hand and he smiles.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, this'll do just fine."

He walks over to the table, places the mug under the sphere, then turns and leans over the keyboard, rattling at it as he types. Tom can't see the screen from where he is, but there's a soft humming sound, and when Tom looks back at the sphere, he sees that the panels are indeed detaching as spindly white arms emerge. They extend down a few inches below the bottom of the sphere, point at the mug, and there's a crescendo in the hum as the mug is suddenly bombarded by beams of light from each of the arms. There's a flash, a quieter hum, and the arms withdraw back into the sphere.

"Uh," says Mike after a few seconds. "Okay. That was neat, but I still don't know what the fuck it _was._"

"Just wait," says McDonald, smiling and straightening up, and now Tom can see the screen, and lines of text are unscrolling on it at an incredible speed, line after line, hundreds. Thousands. He glances at Mike and Mike is staring, mouth slightly open.

"That isn't what I think it is," he says.

"The Realm code for a cup of coffee?" McDonald is smiling wider, and his entire aspect seems to have changed. He's standing straighter, holding his shoulders up, and Tom guesses it might have more than a little to do with the stunned expression on Mike's face. "Yeah, that's pretty much what it is."

"But... how the hell did you do it? We were always sure it was impossible."

"It was just a question of processing power." McDonald looks back at the screen, grinning. The text is still scrolling, white characters on black. Tom can't quite make them out. "Once the technology improved enough..." He reaches out and pats the monitor. "OSCAR has five terabytes of memory. We've clocked him at one point eighty-six petaflops. He's the most powerful computer in the Realm. Might be the most powerful computer anywhere." He pauses and clears his throat. "Well. One of the most powerful."

Tom catches it, the little flicker in the man's face, and he's about to ask what he means, what could be more powerful than that, but Mike speaks, cutting him off. "So... okay, I get it now." He nods to the table and the sphere. "We get a sample of Horse, you scan it, you get its code."

"And possibly it gives us an edge on developing an effective treatment, yes."

"What about manipulating the code directly?"

"Wait, wait." Tom holds up his hands, feeling mildly impatient. "I think I'm missing something. What's the code? Why's it important?"

Mike and McDonald both turn to look at him as if they've just remembered that he's there, and the impatience simmering in Tom's gut flares into full-blown annoyance. Since he's arrived here he's been shoved from place to place, attended a briefing he had nothing to do or say in. He's starting to wonder if he's there for any other purpose than to be in Colonel Mike Pinocchio's entourage.

McDonald speaks. "Harsh Realm is a giant computer program, right? Everything in it is controlled by code, running in the background. The code tells things what to do, what to be. When you shoot something, the code sends the bullet through the air and the code tells whatever you're shooting at to die when it gets hit."

Tom nods. That much he knows. "Okay..."

"That code," McDonald points to the screen, "_is_ a cup of coffee. It's how thick it is, how dark, the exact amount of milk, the milk, the sugar, the grounds in the bottom. The mug. How hot it is when you drink it. Everything."

"Oh." Now it's making more sense. A little. The important aspects, anyway, seem clear. "So what about manipulation?"

"Manipulating the code would be going in and changing something directly. Like, say you wanted to take the milk out of the coffee. You manipulate code all the time, actually, whenever you do anything. And we've found little tricks, like shortcuts. If you've ever seen a digiwand... that was one of ours. But it's just a cloning tool. It's nothing like actually rewriting the raw code."

"And you can't do that?"

McDonald shakes his head. "Not yet, no. Maybe not ever."

Mike cocks his head, stepping forward and peering at the screen. "Processing power again?"

"Exactly." McDonald nods, grimacing slightly as though it's not entirely a comfortable subject. "Reading is one thing. Writing turns out to be something else. In theory we could maybe do it, but the computer we'd need..." He exhales heavily and shakes his head again. "It's years away. Decades. Maybe longer. But if we could, it would make our job with Pale Horse so much easier."

"You mentioned..." Tom frowns, thinking. He feels as though he's on the edge of something, something important. Like there's a shape in his mind that he can't quite make out, flitting away every time he tries to look straight at it. Just for the moment, Mike and Hitchins are completely forgotten. "You said this is one of the most powerful computers around. What're the others?"

"Uh... well, there's one other." McDonald scratches the back of his neck, glancing at the OSCAR terminal. "It's..." He raises a hand and gestures all around them. "It's running all this."

"The Realm?"

Mike straightens up again and turns. "The Realm. Has to be. Look at the size of the program."

Tom frowns harder, still thinking. "So how does it do it?"

"You're from the Real World, right? You're plugged in." McDonald reaches up and taps Tom's forehead lightly. "That's how."

Tom blinks. "My... brain?"

"Sure. Your brain is incredibly powerful in terms of how much data it can process, and you don't even use it up to full capacity. So you process the Realm. You and all your buddies."

Tom takes a breath. He hadn't... So it's not enough that he's plugged in without his consent. He's being used to keep it going, keeping other people imprisoned. His mouth twists and he takes a step back, the claustrophobia swelling again. Christ, there are some things he hadn't really wanted to know. Florence has been standing towards the door, mute and unmoving, arms folded over her chest, but now she steps forward, not touching, but standing close. Tom glances at her and sends a silent thank-you.

Mike ignores them both, turns back to McDonald again. "So why can't you do the same thing here? Why can't you just... plug someone into that?" He points at the terminal and McDonald lets out a faintly nervous laugh.

"Well, uh... you probably could. It would have to be someone plugged in out in the Real World. Virtual character wouldn't work. And... well, I mean, it would probably be lethal."

"Lethal," Mike repeats, raising an eyebrow.

"The brain would already be running the Realm code. Give it another task that big, and it just wouldn't be able to take it. You, uh, you'd probably get a few seconds of processing out of it before the whole thing fried."

"Jesus," Tom murmurs, and steps a little closer to Florence. She reaches down and takes his hand.

"So yeah, direct manipulation... no go." McDonald nods at the terminal. "But even getting the code is a huge step. With that, we can deconstruct Pale Horse from the top down. Maybe make a vaccine. The Realm programmers used a unique language and we're still learning it, but we're definitely ready to go live."

He looks back at the three of them, and his eyes are excited in a way that Tom isn't entirely sure he likes. "Now all we need is our sample."  


* * *

  
"Well, Christ," Mike says as the elevator hums back up to the upper floors of the building. He reaches up and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Fucking progress. Things've changed since I left." He glances over at Tom and smiles wryly. "That'll teach me to grow a conscience."

"Yeah," Tom says, and looks away. He's thinking about human trials and VC, and he's thinking about Mike's hand down Hitchins's pants. He feels Mike's eyes on him, but he doesn't return the gaze, and when the elevator stops at their floor he climbs off without a backwards glance.

They leave Florence at her door, just as before, and she steps inside as though she's relieved to be there. Tom doesn't blame her. He wants to get back in, he thinks as they walk in silence to their own rooms, feed Dexter, maybe take him for a quick walk and then sleep some more, the rest of the afternoon, sleep until someone else wants him to go somewhere and listen to something. The chip in his arm is itching again. Maybe it's all in his head.

"Hobbes."

He looks up, about to slide in his keycard, and Mike is leaning against the wall, something unfamiliar and weirdly uneasy in his eyes. Something maybe a little bit like shame.

He's leaning against the spot where he'd had Hitchins pressed up and groaning softly. Either he doesn't notice or he doesn't remember or he doesn't care.

Tom stares back at him. "What?" And Mike inclines his head back down the hallway again.

"Let's take a walk."

Tom snorts. It doesn't really feel like a laugh. "I'm not going for a walk with you, Pinocchio."

"I really think you should." He leans in a little. "We need to talk. And..." There's a faint whining coming from the other side of the door, and Mike half smiles. "Bring the mutt. He's probably going stir-crazy in there."

"Pinocchio..." Tom leans his forehead against the door and sighs. "I just... I can't..."

"Please."

Tom turns his head, still leaning against the door, and looks at him. Mike doesn't say that word very much. "You're hell to live with," he says quietly. "I just wanted you to know that."

"I know." Mike laughs and looks down at the carpet, rich and ornate, and again this all feels so wrong. They shouldn't be here, Dexter shouldn't be whining behind the door, Florence shouldn't be curling tighter and tighter into herself and Mike Pinocchio should not be saying words like 'please'. "Believe me, I do know that."

"Okay." Tom slides the keycard into the slot, and he feels something in himself simultaneously collapsing and pulling itself back together again. "We'll go. Let me get him."  


* * *

  
They walk out on the terrace, past potted shrubs and little sapling trees, the rebuilt city huge and gleaming in the background. It still feels dreamlike, even in the light of early afternoon, and Tom stares at it for a few seconds before he starts to walk again. There's a marble railing and he trails his fingers along it, watching the sun glint off it and wondering when he's going to wake up.

Or when his brain is going to fry.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," Mike says, and it's so abrupt and unexpected that Tom almost trips over a flagstone. He turns, leans back against the railing and looks at him, swallowing hard. Dexter, unconcerned, trots away to lift his leg against one of the potted shrubs.

"Okay." Tom nods once. "All right." And he waits.

Mike pauses, looks away and shrugs. "That's it. I'm sorry. I dunno what else you want me to say."

"Well..." Tom stutters a little, feeling his ears go red. "I just—Why the fuck _didn't_ you tell me?"

"Oh, I dunno, maybe because you're reacting like this?"

"I'm reacting like this because you _didn't tell me._" Tom turns and braces his hands against the railing, staring out at the obscenely glistening city. "Three years, Pinocchio. Three years and I'm just finding this out now. And I've--"

"What?" Mike's next to him now, leaning in, trying to force him into facing him head on, but Tom looks away, and it feels childish but he just doesn't think he can do it. He doesn't want to hit him. He doesn't want to get into a fistfight with Mike Pinocchio out here on the terrace where everyone can see. "What? You've been this close to me this long? Christ's sake, Hobbes, it's not like I ever made a pass at you."

Tom closes his eyes and takes a slow breath, and then another. "That's not it," he says. "I don't... I don't have a problem with _that._ If you'd just _told me._"

There's a pause, a faint sound of sirens out in the city, and then Mike huffs a laugh and turns away again, and for a few seconds Tom thinks he's done, that he's going to walk away and not say anything more about it.

"I hid it from you because I didn't know what you'd do, and I gotta live with you," Mike says quietly, still facing away. "And I hid it because... I dunno. Habit. I was Army too, Hobbes. And you know what that's like."

Tom nods, mostly to himself, but he nods. He doesn't know what that's like, what it must be like to be there and be queer, but he can try to imagine. He leans further over the railing and lets the wind chill his ears and neck. "But you sleep with women," he says. "I've seen you."

Mike laughs, turns and leans over next to him, and Tom feels the tension ease a little. He's not even really sure why. But he's not going to argue with it. "You don't always have to be one thing or the other, Hobbes." Mike glances at him, and there's a tiny smile pulling at his mouth that isn't really like any other smile Tom's seen him allow himself. "People are just more complicated than that."

Yes, they are. Tom rubs a hand over his face and raises his head. "So why Hitchins?"

Mike shrugs. "I was drunk and he was there. Didn't really need a lot more reason." He laughs slightly. "Think he's got kind of a... I dunno. A thing about us. He was asking me about you like you're his fuckin' hero."

_Hero._ Tom feels a strange combination of awkward and flattered, and he turns to look at Mike more squarely. "What was he asking?"

"Y'know. Normal stuff. Where you're from. Where you grew up. Favorite color, shoe size." He laughs again and shakes his head when Tom reaches out and punches him lightly in the shoulder. "I dunno, man. He just wanted to know about you. He wanted to hear about life outside the fence." Something subtle in his voice changes, and when he looks out at the office towers and cars and unburned houses, Tom sees another flash of that profound distaste, as though he's taken a bite of something rotten. "Fucking kid was talking about it like he thinks it's a big adventure."

Tom frowns. It's not like this is new. Kids hear glory tales about war, they learn to shoot, they go off and discover what it really is. It's always hard. It's always there.

"Pinocchio, if you..." He trails off, shaking his head. He's not sure he wants to even use the imagination necessary to articulate that. "If you... go out with him again... just be careful, okay? He's a good kid."

"'Go out'?" Mike stares at him for a moment or two and laughs. "Christ, Hobbes. Okay. Okay, I'll be careful."

"All right." Tom whistles for Dexter, turns and looks back at the main doors. He feels better. A little. Everything's still wrong, but at least this part doesn't have to be. Not completely. "I'm hungry. I'm headed back."

"Me too. I'll buy you lunch."

Tom gives him a half smile. "You don't have any money. I don't think they'd even ask for any."

"I'll pretend to buy you lunch."

"Okay."

They're almost at the doors again, when the doors open and Hitchins steps out, stops, turns beet red. Tom groans slightly, fights the urge to turn and start walking in the other direction. Mike looks entirely unshaken.

"Um. Sir." Hitchins glances back inside. "They wanted me to alert you. They thought you might want to come observe."

Mike raises his eyebrows, nonplussed. "Observe what?"

"The field team. They're back." Hitchins pauses, glancing nervously at Tom. "They've got a sample."


	3. Incubation

-8-

"Follow Hitchins," Mike says, pausing in the lobby, and Tom glances back at him, questioning. "He'll take you down to containment."

"But what're you--"

Mike waves a hand at him. "If I don't eat something I'm going to fucking collapse. I'm just going to the cafeteria. I'll meet up with you in ten." He smiles, crooked and still a little uncertain. "I'll bring you something."

Tom watches him for another second or two and then turns back to Hitchins, feeling his stomach sink. And yes, he's hungry. But he'd just wanted a moment to take a breath. He looks at Hitchins, and Hitchins is blushing again and trying to look anywhere but at Tom.

It's strange. Yes, there had been Escalante, but he'd been hardened, toned by the Guard. Hitchins isn't either. He might be a good soldier... but he doesn't really feel like a soldier at all.

Then again, he's also not currently pointing his gun at Tom's head.

"Containment?" Tom asks, by way of kicking things back into gear, and Hitchins nods.

"Level B4. We've got a quarantine unit set up." He turns and starts to walk towards the elevators. "Follow me, sir. I'll escort you."

"Wait a second." Tom doesn't move and Hitchins turns again, looking apprehensive. "Quarantine? I thought this was a sample." He'd been thinking vials, test tubes. You'd need a high security lab for that. You shouldn't need a quarantine.

"Sir," Hitchins says, "we really should go. I'll explain on the way, sir. Please..." He inclines his head forward and Tom sighs, following. One of these times he'll put his foot down and go lock himself in his room. If he even can.

"Dexter!" Tom whistles and Dexter comes running around a corner, stopping by his feet and looking up at him with wide brown eyes. Hitchins gives him a doubtful look.

"Sir, I'm really not sure they'll allow you to bring an animal into containment."

"Then I'll take him back to my room." Tom leans over and presses the up arrow, turning back to Hitchins and crossing his arms, and Hitchins bites his lip.  


* * *

  
They make it most of the way back to Tom's room before Hitchins speaks again, slowly and hesitantly, looking straight ahead. A boot camp kind of stare, the kind you learn to adopt when there's a drill sergeant screaming abuse into your face. "Sir, I wanted to apologize for the other night. It was... inappropriate."

Tom stops outside his door and pulls out his keycard. It's really almost funny, like there's something about this particular spot in the building. He affords Hitchins a single glance before he opens the door and lets Dexter trot in. There's a bowl of water on the kitchen floor, a piece of leftover fried chicken that he'd found in a pack in the fridge the night before. He'll be fine, Tom tells himself as he closes the door again. Just fine. Locked in a glorified hotel suite when he's used to fields and trees.

"I told you. Stop calling me 'sir'."

"Well." Hitchins looks away again and shuffles his boots against the carpet. "It was still... I shouldn't have done it." He pauses and when he speaks again there's a thread of desperation in his voice. "Please, si-- Hobbes... just don't tell anyone. They could demote me. They could kick me out."

Tom looks at him a little more closely. "And you really want to stay?"

Hitchins looks confused. "Why would you think I wouldn't want to stay?"

Tom shrugs. "I don't know. You just seem... you seem like maybe you'd be happier with another job." He smiles faintly. "You don't strike me as the kind of guy who really gets a kick outta shooting people."

"Well, I..." Hitchins looks down at his boots, still shuffling, hands clasped behind his back. "I have a little sister. Our parents are gone. You get in the Guard, you're set, and so's your family. If anything happens to me... I know she's taken care of."

"Oh." Tom goes quiet for a moment, thinking about the boys he'd known, the good boys, a long way from home and family, living through letters and photographs and phone calls. Boys working for college and a future and for people left behind, and the boys who had just wanted to fight for their country. Boys like that, not existing only in books or movies. Boys like that in every army, in every cause.

He feels a slow rage boiling up in his chest. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and fucking Santiago. Letting all the boys like this down.

"Okay," he says, and shakes himself slightly. "I just... wondered." He jerks his head down the hallway. "We should get going."

"Right." Hitchins also seems to remember himself, and they start walking again. "And you won't...?"

"Won't say a word."

"Thank you. Hobbes."

Tom half smiles. "You should be careful around him, though."

"Yes, they..." Hitchins blushes again, just at the tips of his ears, almost the same red as his beret. "They told me about that."

Tom raises an eyebrow. "Told you about what?"

"They..." Hitchins looks at him, and he looks slightly mortified. "Well, I mean... Colonel Pinocchio... I heard he sort of... got around."

_Got around._ That actually fits with what he's seen of Mike better than some other things, and he shrugs, ignoring the stab of discomfort that comes with the little he imagines before he can stop himself. "Probably did."

The elevator ride is quiet at first, and then Hitchins speaks again. "So how long have you known him?"

"I've..." Tom's mouth twists into something that might be a smile and he lowers his head. "Three years. Maybe a little more. Since I got here."

"You're from the Real World."

"Yeah."

"They say..." Hitchins's voice drops to a conspiratorial low, as if he's afraid of being overheard. "I heard you were special."

Tom looks up again. He's so, so tired of hearing that. "I'm not special, Hitchins."

Hitchins opens his mouth, closes it again, says nothing else. Tom almost feels bad, just for a moment. But it's better. Really, it's better. A year ago, he finally learned how dangerous it is to think like that. Mike had probably been so relieved.

The doors open, and it's a bright, white hallway just like the one two levels above it. Mike looks up as Tom steps out, and raises what looks like a ham sandwich in greeting. He's already halfway into another one. Tom takes the sandwich and looks down at it. Suddenly he doesn't feel all that hungry.

"Sir." Hitchins nods at Mike and walks backwards a few steps. "If you'll follow me."

"Shouldn't we get Florence?" Tom asks, glancing around them. It isn't really like the level above. There's no doors, no plaques. Everything looks spotlessly clean and absolutely featureless. Mike swallows his bite and shakes his head.

"She shouldn't be in on this." His mouth tightens slightly. "She wouldn't... like it."

"Oh." More apprehension. _Quarantine._ Hitchins is rounding a corner and tapping in numbers on a keypad. "They said something about a quarantine."

Mike doesn't answer immediately, and they step through and into a smaller room. The door shuts behind them, and he sighs. "Hobbes, there's something you need to know about Horse."

But he never gets as far as what it is. The door in front of them hisses open with the sound of a vacuum seal breaking, and immediately the quiet around them dissolves into screams and yelling. Tom stares, trying to make sense of what he's seeing, even as Hitchins is pushing them both back.

The room is larger, but still not large. Tom gets the sense that it opens into somewhere bigger. Directly in front of them are three Guardsmen with guns and respirator masks, their hands gloved in blue latex. The Guardsmen are facing more Guardsmen, two of them, also masked and gloved, both holding out empty hands to the girl standing in the center of the room. She's small, young, no more than sixteen, and her dark skin stands out jarringly against her white hospital smock.

"What the _hell,_" Hitchins is yelling to the Guardsmen in front of them. "She was in containment! What the fuck _happened?_"

"She got loose. She's..." The Guardsman shakes his head helplessly, not turning around. "We can't shoot her. We liquidated everyone else, she's all that's left."

"Miss," one of the Guardsmen with the empty hands is saying. "Just please, calm down and cooperate. We want to help you."

"You killed my _family!_" The girl shakes her head, bares her teeth and lunges at the man, who takes a hasty step back. "My whole family. You think I'm gonna cooperate with you? Mother_fucker._" She shoves a rolling cabinet at the other Guardsmen, who catches it and pushes it aside.

"You're sick," the first man says. "Listen to me. Listen! You'll be dead in a week—or you can let us try to help you."

"I don't care." The girl turns towards the Guardsmen with the guns and snarls. "Fucking kill me. I'd rather be dead. If it's gonna happen anyway, _get it the fuck over with._"

"Hey." Tom looks to the side, his attention momentarily caught, because Mike is pressing against Hitchins's restraining arm, a look in his eyes that he's never quite seen before. "Hey. Just... look, you got a name? Just tell me your name."

The girl freezes, as if she's not quite sure what to do with the question. She looks around at the men surrounding her, then back at Mike, and Tom can see the fear behind the sullen anger. "My name's Kiana. That's the name my mom and dad gave me. And you killed them, you fuckers."

"You killed them?" Mike turns to one of the Guardsmen. "That was kind of a dick move, fellas. You didn't think this might end up happening if you did that? What, did you think she'd be pleased?"

"We had our orders," says one of the men, uncertainly. "Sir."

"Yeah, well, fuck your orders." He turns back to Kiana again, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I know that sucks, and these guys are fucking assholes for doing it. But it's done. They were sick, weren't they?"

"They..." Kiana takes a step back, face twisting for a moment, and Tom sees how very young she is. How scared. "One of the guys with us. He kept coughing. He wouldn't stop."

"Yeah." Mike closes his eyes for a second. "Kiana? If you don't give a fuck about these shits, I get that, I do. But other people are gonna get sick. Innocent people. They're gonna die. A lot of people are gonna die. But you can help us. You can help stop that from happening." He takes a slow step forward, pushing Hitchins's arm aside, and Hitchins lets it fall, watching Mike with a faintly stunned expression. "Please. Help us."

For a moment Mike and Kiana stare at each other, and everyone else stares at them, and Tom isn't sure anyone is even breathing. Finally Kiana seems to sag where she stands, and one of the men steps forward and takes her arm, looking up at his companion. "Get the workup ready to go. I'll get her into the module."

He heads away from them, out of sight around a corner, and the Guardsmen with guns follow. Mike catches one by the shoulder. "Be nice to her," he says. "Okay? She's a fucking kid. And you killed her goddamn parents, you stupid asswipe."

Tom expects the Guardsman to shoot back with something, maybe shove Mike back with the butt of his gun, but the man turns and walks away without another word, and there's a very slight slump to his shoulders.

Maybe it's not so hard to see how this man might have once led an army.

Mike turns back to them, rubbing a hand over his face. "Christ. Fucking amateurs." He drops his hand and looks at Hitchins. "So that's our sample? Fantastic. This is gonna be a goddamn picnic."

"Do we really need to be here?" Tom is already taking a step back, the claustrophobic feeling returning as a tightness in his gut, and he realizes with mild horror that he's still holding the sandwich. He's the furthest from hungry that he thinks he's ever been. "Because I really, really think I need to get drunk."

Mike looks at him for a couple of seconds, considering, before he takes Tom by the arm, and it's one of the few times that Tom's found himself taking real comfort in Mike's touch.

"Come with me." He reaches down, plucks the sandwich out of Tom's hand, and holds it out to Hitchins. "Here. Happy fucking birthday."

 

-9-

The bar doesn't make him feel any better. It's all low lights and dark wood, Tiffany lampshades, and over the bar is a TV showing what looks like a basketball game. Tom leans forward on the stool and covers his face with his hands. Outside the fence, the easier thing had been to know that you weren't home. Every second was a reminder. You knew where you stood. You knew where you were, because you knew where you weren't. He feels jetlagged, almost dizzy.

"Here." Mike slides a pint glass over to him and takes a hefty swallow from his own. "C'mon, when was the last time you had a decent beer?"

"I don't want a decent beer," Tom mutters, picking up the glass and looking at the light on the bubbles as they drift up to the surface. "I want a shitty beer. I don't even want beer." He takes a swallow, and it is good. Too good. It almost makes him gag.

Mike looks at him for a moment. "That depends on how drunk you really wanna get," he says finally. "You finish that, we'll see about something stronger." He smiles at Tom with the corner of his mouth. "Gotta start slow, GI."

Tom doesn't really want to start slow, either. He wants to get drunker than he has in years, drunk enough that he can stop thinking about this, go to bed and sleep through the next day. There's a little girl in the basement and she's dying. Outside the fence, the world could be dead for all he knows.

If he's going to feel disconnected, it seems stupid to do it in half measures.

When he looks down again half the beer is gone and he's starting to think that maybe he ought to pile some food on top of it, just to give it a cushion. "Pinocchio..."

He doesn't have to say anything else. Mike waves to the bartender. "You got chicken fingers? Give us chicken fingers. Two orders. And a lotta barbecue sauce." _Chicken fingers._ A week out from eating blackened rat. Tom bites back a laugh.

The chicken fingers, when they come, are thick and so greasy they almost drip, and suddenly he's eating so fast he's close to choking. Mike lays a hand on his arm. "Jesus. Settle down there, buddy, it's not gonna walk off the fucking plate." Tom mutters something in his general direction, but he eases off slightly, sitting up a little straighter.

"You were saying something." His head is spinning gently, and the entire room feels very warm. He closes his eyes and remembers the dead trees, opens them again and sees the soft glow of the lamps and the flickering light of the TV. Harsh Realm is two worlds, and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. "You were saying something about Pale Horse."

Mike wipes some sauce off his lips with the back of his hand. "When?"

"When we were going into containment." Another swallow, and now the pint glass is almost empty. "You said there was something I needed to know."

"Oh." Mike clears his throat, shifting on the stool. "Right. Here's the thing. You know how when people die here, they digitize?"

Tom nods. That seems like a stupid question. He's seen it more times than he cares to remember. He sees it in his dreams.

"Pale Horse can't live outside a body for more than about an hour. It's kinda complicated, but the digitizing has something to do with it."

Tom blinks, trying to understand this. He'd never done terribly well in high school biology, but this barely counts as biology anyway. Biology here is all zeros and ones. "What about if it's in... a blood sample, or something?"

Mike shakes his head. "You can see it, if you test for it, but it's inert. It shuts down. You can't do anything else with it. If you inject it into someone else, it wakes up again." He taps the bar lightly, and in the dimness his eyes look distant. "That's what the original sample was. But you wanna do anything with it, scan it... you need it when it's active."

Tom's mouth twists and he sets the glass back on the bar, maybe a little harder than he'd meant to. The bartender glances away from the TV and at them, looking a little doubtful. Tom smiles an apology, glances around. There aren't that many other people in here. A couple of guys in business suits. A couple of off-duty Guardsmen. He wonders how many of them have seen his wanted posters, how many would recognize him if they took a really good look. He wonders how many of them think he's special.

"So, Kiana," he says dully.

"Yeah. Kiana."

"Is she gonna die?"

Mike motions the bartender over again and speaks close to his ear; the bartender nods, reaches behind the bar and sets down a bottle of Jack Daniels and two shot glasses. Mike pours out one, then the other, and lifts his, turning it. "I hope not," he says. "I really do." And he knocks the shot back, eyes slipping closed in some kind of pleasure as he swallows.

"Me too," Tom murmurs, looking down at the drink in his hand. He hasn't ever done much in the way of shots. A few times. Once, before he'd gotten the tattoo, and he remembers dizziness and a kind of roaring goodwill towards everyone he happened to stumble into. He hasn't been drunk more than twice since he got here. Mike hasn't let him. He sometimes thinks that it would bother him more that Mike so often treats him like a child, if his place didn't so often make him feel like one.  


* * *

  
He's not sure how many shots later it is. Counting time by shots is a strange idea in itself, but no stranger than anything else. The bar has half emptied out, only a few people left, and the bartender, a middle-aged man with white hair and a red sweater, is standing off to the side polishing a glass and watching them. He's been watching them for most of the night. Tom's sure Mike knows it, and if Mike doesn't care enough to make some kind of deal out of it, he supposes that he doesn't either.

"So is this where you went? The night you... with Hitchins?"

Mike is trying to pour them another round, and he doesn't seem particularly drunk, not to Tom, but he's having a little trouble holding the bottle steady. He laughs, and that doesn't help anything. "You and fucking Hitchins. Jesus, Hobbes. I didn't even _get_ to do anything with him." He finally gets the glasses filled and raises his with a sardonic smile. "Thanks to you. Protecting his fucking purity."

"Y'know, he's probably a teenager." Tom tosses the stuff back and coughs at the burn. He feels incredibly flushed. "He's a teenager and you're... I don't even know how old you are."

"I'm thirty seven," Mike says, shooting Tom a look. "And yeah, he's nineteen. So? What the fuck does that have to do with anything?"

"It's _gross,_" Tom sputters, but he's laughing. Flushed, yeah, and lightheaded, and if he's sitting in a bar drinking his way past the end of the world, it's not even the weirdest thing he's done since he got here. "Fuck, Pinocchio, you're a dirty old man."

"Never said I wasn't." Mike grins. "Anyway, what the fuck do you know, with your goddamn virginal ass."

"I'm not a virgin." Tom shakes his head, all earnestness. "I'm not. Just because I'm monogamous..." The word is harder to say than he remembers it and he fumbles with it a little, eyes caught by the woodgrain in the bar top. The Tiffany lamp colors reflected in the shine. _Where I come from all the colors like that are broken,_ Tom thinks, and he doesn't completely know what it means. When he looks up again Mike is watching him with an amused curl to his mouth.

"Didn't say you were a total virgin," he says, a very faint slur around his words. "I was talking about your ass. Or do you got something you wanna tell me?"

Tom feels the flush rise fiercely, up and unto his neck and ears, and he turns a little away. Before, he would have known how to take that, just regular teasing, just Mike Pinocchio tugging at his pigtails. Harmless, in its way.

Now he's just not sure anymore.

"Hey," Mike says, and he feels a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, it was just a joke. Relax."

"Don't make jokes like that."

Mike snorts and his hand drops away. "Thought you said you didn't have a problem with it."

"I _don't._ It's just..." He shakes his head again and tips back the shot. No, he really shouldn't care. He shouldn't care about anything. It's all going to shit, anyway. "Look, just forget it."

Mike snorts another laugh but says nothing else, not quite looking at him, and through the confusion and the whiskey Tom finds himself feeling oddly bad about it. He doesn't know why a joke like that should bother him. It really shouldn't. It's just Mike. It's just how Mike is.

And Mike's felt the need to keep this from him for a long time.

"When I was back in Yugoslavia," he says, "I... I caught two of my men. Walked in on them. Scared the hell outta them. " He's speaking slowly, the words seeming to come on their own, like they need to be said. Whether it's a peace offering or something else, he's not sure, but he's drinking with Mike Pinocchio in a fucking sports bar in a dying world, and it feels like the time to speak of things like this. "I never said anything about it." Couldn't do that to them. They'd been horny and lonely, probably scared out of their minds, and it had seemed like the worst reason to give someone a dishonorable discharge that he could ever have imagined.

Mike looks at him for a few seconds, eyes hooded, and Tom realizes that he's not quite breathing. But then Mike nods, once, and his mouth curves into something close to a smile.

"Good for you." And it's not sarcastic. Tom can't detect a single note of sarcasm in it.

"So when did you know?" Because it's easier talking about this than Pale Horse, and thinking about Kiana locked away in her white room, her eyes very bright in her dark face. Mike shrugs.

"Always. 'S kinda something you just... figure out."

"Did you tell anyone?"

"You have one of those guys in your high school, Hobbes?" He's pouring out another round, but Tom's starting to feel doubtful. He'd like to be able to walk out of here on his own legs. He'd also like to not be actually sick. "You know, doesn't really fit, no girlfriends, gets called fag all the time. Maybe gets jumped after school." He hands over the shot glass and his mouth is a little tight. "Would you have been that guy? Voluntarily?"

Tom takes the glass, shaking his head. He's feeling guilty again, feeling small and childlike. It isn't just this place. It's everything. Maybe it just took this place to make him realize it. "No." He pauses. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Wasn't anyone's fault." Tip, swallow, and Mike exhales hard. "It was just one of those things."  


* * *

  
They've finished the bottle by the time they stumble out, and instead of paying with cash Mike holds out his arm, which the bartender scans with a small, boxy-looking thing, nodding when it beeps softly. "What was that?" Tom slurs, leaning on him as they head out the door into the night, and Mike laughs.

"Charging it to the government. The thing holds a line of credit. Told you it was on sugar daddy's dollar." And because he's not sure when he's last been this drunk and because absolutely everything seems a little bit funny at the moment, Tom tips his head back and laughs too. And it feels good. He doesn't even feel sick. Doesn't feel worried. There's an entire section of his brain that simply isn't talking at all. Dimly he wonders if he's killed it off for good.

Probably too much to hope.

The trip back to the building is hazy. He remembers lit streets, a haze of yellow light, cars passing them, once or twice someone on the sidewalk stopping to give them a puzzled and faintly disapproving look. In their street clothes and jackets, they're not soldiers. They're no one. They could be staggering through any city, in any world, and Tom begins to be sure that he could reach out and slip his fingers under the skin of things. He could pull this world aside like a curtain and walk through into where he knows he belongs, into light and life and Sophie's arms. Mike's arm is hooked around his shoulders and he's solid and warm. He's real, even if nothing else is.

"Mike," he murmurs, and there's soft carpet under his feet and the hum of an elevator. He stumbles and Mike catches him and he feels a rush of gratitude. Sleep. He really just needs to sleep. Maybe this is all a dream he can wake up from.

Maybe he doesn't want to.

"You're okay," Mike is saying, and Tom thinks _Yes, I'm okay._ He's not sick. That's what really matters. Kiana is sick. Kiana... He closes his eyes, but he doesn't stop walking. Mike is pushing him along.

They stop, and he thinks it must be because they're at his room. He feels the wall at his back and Mike is shaking him gently. "Where's your keycard? Hey. Hobbes." A little more shaking and Mike's laughing, or Tom thinks he is. He'd just like to stand here with his eyes closed, at least until the world stops spinning. He feels the heat of someone standing close to him, and then hands in his pockets.

"Are we gonna die?"

The hands stop. Tom manages to open his eyes and Mike is there, looking back at him, very close. There's something in his eyes that Tom's never seen before.

"Everyone dies, Hobbes."

His fingers close on something in Tom's left pocket and he steps back and away. Tom sags slightly against the wall. This isn't right. None of this is right. He hears the door click open and Mike is slipping an arm around his shoulders, tugging him away from the wall. "C'mon, Hobbes. You puke on me, I'm kicking your ass."

_Virgin ass,_ Tom thinks, and almost giggles.

Dexter runs over to him, sniffing at his feet and yipping once before Mike hushes him. Tom looks across the room with bleary eyes. It looks like a long way to the bedroom, though he knows it's not. Not normally. This isn't normal. This hasn't really been normal since they got here. One foot in front of the other, and the doorway gets nearer and nearer, and then it's as though he blinks once and he's there, and Mike's helping him to sit down on the end of the bed, kneeling down to pull off his boots. Tom stares stupidly at him, wondering if there's something he should be doing to help.

"Haven't done this for anyone in ten fucking years," Mike is muttering. "You're lucky I like you so much, dick."

"You like me?" For some reason he's surprised to hear that. He's not sure he's ever heard Mike say anything of the kind. They've been through fifty different kinds of hell together, saved each other's ass more times than he could count, but he's never taken the time to wonder why. 'Why' hasn't even seemed like much of an issue. You do it because that's what you do. You don't leave a man behind.

Mike looks up as he unlaces the other boot, and Tom is oddly pleased to see that he looks a little surprised as well, as if he's just now considering the question. "Yeah, sure I like you." He grins crookedly. "Haven't killed you yet, right?"

"Not yet." Tom manages a smile.

Mike straightens up again, and suddenly Tom doesn't want him to leave. Night after night after night, hundreds of them, together, barely feet away from each other, and he doesn't want Mike to leave. Last night he'd thought it was the softness of the bed, too new and too fresh and far too luxurious. Now he's wondering if that's all it was, and he wants to sleep well tonight.

"Wait." And he reaches out and grabs Mike's arm, tugging at him, staring up and feeling small and foolish and needy, but he can't seem to stop himself now. "Can you stay? Can you just--?"

Mike staring at him, face twisting in confusion, and he tries to pull out of Tom's grip. "Hobbes... look, I gotta go. You'll be fine."

"No." Tom pulls harder, not even sure how hard, because it's difficult to completely control his muscles. "C'mon, please--"

He's not entirely sure what happens next. It's a series of flashes, like still frames in a film. Mike stumbles, pitches forward, and then he's on his back on the bed with Mike on top of him. He's breathless suddenly, not entirely sure why, but when he looks up he sees how blue Mike's eyes are. He's never really realized how blue. It's been a long time since he saw a sky that blue. And in the blue are little flecks of green, so small he'd have never seen them from further away than this, and he leans up to get a better look. It's only when Mike makes a quiet, muffled sound and his eyes flutter shut that Tom realizes what he's done. He freezes. This isn't...

_Oh, God._

He should move away. He should stop this. So far it isn't much, just mouth against mouth, but he isn't moving. He _can't_ move.

And then he feels the light flick of Mike's tongue against his lips and he can't quite move fast enough.

"_Shit,_" Mike is hissing, shoving himself up and off the bed with a hand to his mouth like he's afraid it might try something else. "Shit, Hobbes, I'm sorry, I didn't--"

"No." Tom's sitting up, shaking himself, staring as a strange numbness starts to steal through his muscles. "No, it's... It's my fault, don't worry about it."

Mike is still standing there, hands hanging at his sides, clenching into fists and unclenching again. Tom's seen a lot of expressions on Mike's face in his time. He's never seen Mike look quite this mortified. At any other time it would almost be funny.

"It's really okay." Suddenly he's just tired again, tired and entirely too sober. "You can go, Pinocchio. I'll be fine."

"Okay." And still Mike stays for another few seconds, jaw working very slightly, as if he might say something, before he turns, walks away, and Tom hears his door open and close again.

He drops back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. After a few minutes he licks his lips. He's not sure what he expected to taste. He doesn't taste anything.

Another few minutes and he gets up, goes to the bathroom and washes his face, comes back and undresses, slowly, as if his mind is elsewhere. He looks doubtfully at the bed, but he slides in between the sheets and once again Dexter hops up and settles down by his feet. He turns off the light.

He's not sure how much later it is, but he's still awake and still staring up at the ceiling in the dark when he hears more scuffling in the hall, though it's quieter this time, and a "Fuck, Hitchins, keep it _down._" Then a door opening, closing, and very soon after a muffled groan, and another, and then the groans slip into a rhythm, a rhythm that starts to rise into soft cries.

Tom puts a pillow over his head. It doesn't exactly help.

 

-10-

It's not light yet when he opens his eyes, and for a moment he lies there tangled in the sheets, trying to pull his scattered thoughts together. He doesn't remember finally falling asleep. He doesn't know what's wakened him. But he listens and after a few seconds the soft rapping on the door comes again. He's become a light sleeper. It wouldn't take much more than that.

He gets up, pulls on his robe and opens the door, and he's not even all that surprised to see Florence standing there, still in the same clothes of a day before. She looks at him inquiringly, and he stands aside to let her in, but she reaches out and tugs lightly at his sleeve, inclining her head down the hall.

"Okay," he says, rubbing at his eyes. "Okay, just gimmie a sec. Let me get something on."

He pulls on the clothes heaped at the foot of the bed, gives Dexter a quick pat and heads back out to the hall again. Florence is still waiting, arms crossed and an unsettled look in her eyes. He reaches out and touches her arm. In the absence of words, so much of what passes between them is now in the form of touch. "What's wrong?"

She shakes her head, nods down the hall again. _Later. Come on._

He would be frustrated at the current trend of people telling him things only when he makes a pest out of himself, but from her, it seems perfectly reasonable, and he follows her without another word, passing through silent halls with their feet hardly making a sound on the thick carpet. Again, it strikes him how strange it is to be free here, to be prevented only from going too far away. Again, that sense that all the rules have changed.

He remembers the warmth of Mike's mouth on his and shakes his head slightly. No. That hadn't even been a change in the rules. That had been an enormous mistake.

He's not sure how long they walk; in the pre-dawn quiet the time feels more pliable. Up a flight of stairs, through a door, and he's about to ask her how she seems so sure of where she's going when he sees where they are and he falls silent even as she's raising a finger to her lips.

They're standing in a low gallery overlooking the room in which they'd had their briefing. The front of the gallery is lined with a few seats, and Tom gets the feeling that it's reserved for guests of state, people allowed to observe but not to participate. Not far below them, seated at the round table and lit mainly by the glow of the map, are Mike and Santiago.

"--Don't know what you even wanted me here for," Mike is saying, leaning back with his arms crossed sullenly over his chest. "I've done fuck-all so far, and you know I don't even know anything about it. You made me a supervisor. That's all."

Tom feels another tug on his arm, looks down and sees that Florence is keeping herself very low, very still. And then he realizes: Mike doesn't know that they're there. Santiago doesn't know that they're there. This is something that maybe he isn't meant to be seeing.

But Florence wants him to see it.

"You're the only one _left,_" Santiago says, leaning across the table. "All the others are dead or defected."

"So why didn't you go after the defectors?"

"Because we couldn't find them. And then you happened to drop into our laps." Santiago smiles. "It was really very convenient, actually. But you're right. We do need more than what you can give us."

Mike shrugs. "So."

"So, we think we've tracked one of them down."

"Who?"

"Elliot."

Faintly, Tom hears Mike snort a laugh. "He defected? He had the guts? Guy was scared of his own goddamn shadow."

Santiago folds his hands over the table. "A week after you left, he passed through the fence and we lost track of him." He pauses, and even from where he is, Tom can see the look he gives Mike. Wary. Calculating. "We believe your departure... emboldened him."

For a moment Mike says nothing at all, stretching out a hand and tapping his fingers lightly on the tabletop. Then, "I made it look like I was dead. I made it look very fucking convincing."

"Not all of us were convinced."

"Were you?"

Santiago smiles faintly. "It doesn't matter whether I was convinced or not. You're here now."

"Yeah, and I'm gonna be gone the second we get this settled."

"Oh, come on, Michael." Santiago sits back again, and Tom can hear the frustration, a slight trace of scorn. "Don't think we haven't noticed you striding around the last couple of days. Giving orders. Acting like you own the place. Because you do. You think Waters has no reason to have an attitude with you? You think it's just personal dislike? This whole time, he was against me bringing you back here because he saw his job in jeopardy." He nods once, as if to punctuate the last word, and then glances up, and although Tom knows he's hidden in shadow and outside lines of sight, for an instant he's sure he's been seen.

Mike is silent for a long time, fingers still tapping, tapping so lightly they don't make any sound. Then, "Is he right?"

"That very much depends on you."

Mike laughs again, shaking his head, incredulous. "You don't expect me to believe there's really a place for me here."

"There is if you want it, Michael. There always has been." From where he is, Tom can see Santiago's face clearly, the look in his eyes, and he's seen that look before. A long time ago. The utter assuredness. So solid and convincing that it's difficult to look at it and not begin to become convinced as well.

_Those people are just on the wrong side. You must be able to see that now._

_You've been sent on a mission from which you can't return. _

Mike shakes his head again, but this time there's a weariness about it, as if this is a conversation that he's had before now. "Omar..."

"I would have given you everything." Santiago is leaning forward again, intent, eyes almost seeming to glow in the dimness. "Waters is nothing and he knows it. He's not half the soldier you were, not half the _leader._ I would have made you my son. I would have given you the keys to my kingdom. And you could have made what I've built twice as great."

Mike raises a hand, and Santiago falls silent. Tom finds himself taking a breath, taking it as if he hasn't taken one in a long time. He's not supposed to see this, but he needs to see it.

"I don't want your fucking keys." He drops his hand, and although Tom can't clearly see his face, he hears the thin smile in his voice. "And I never liked my father."

Santiago sits back, face gone flat, his hands folded together over the table. "All right, then."

Mike sighs and tilts his head back, rubbing his eyes. "C'mon, Omar, you didn't just call me down here to do a Last Temptation of Christ thing. What the fuck do you want?"

"We're sending out a team this afternoon, with the goal of apprehending Elliot. I want you on it."

"Why?"

"He knows you. I was hoping you might convince him to come quietly."

Mike snorts. "So you're sending me with a bunch of grunts with guns. You thought this brilliant plan all the way through?"

"He probably _won't_ come quietly." Santiago shrugs. "We use you, you don't work, then what exactly do we have if we don't have grunts with guns?"

"Fine." Mike sighs again, head still tilted back. "Who else is going?"

"Your friends, Tom Hobbes and Florence. Major Waters. A few of the men directly under him."

"Fine," Mike says again. "How far out?"

"A day. Maybe two."

"Where?"

Santiago pauses at that, and Tom gets the feeling that he's actually reluctant to answer. But finally he says "West."

Mike sits up a little straighter. "Back into the badlands."

Santiago smiles a thin little knife edge. "You of all people should know the advantages to going there, Michael."

"I guess." Mike's voice is tight, and Tom catches Florence's glance. _The badlands?_ Where they'd been before, maybe, though that had been further south. Poisoned ground and water. It had been pretty bad.

Is there worse out there?

"Did he steal it?"

"We don't know." Santiago's voice is low and flat, and for the first time Tom feels a stirring of outright doubt. They've been assuming that it's true, that there's good faith, that the Guard themselves don't have anything to do with it. They've been assuming. His first week in basic, he'd been told all about assuming. "We don't know who stole the sample."

"Yeah, see, that's something I never really got. How could you not know? How could you not have any idea?"

Santiago stiffens a little. "We experienced a complete shut-down of the power grid for the whole area, for approximately thirty minutes. We believe the theft occurred during that time."

"What about backup power?"

"It also went down." And again, doubt, because Santiago sounds almost embarrassed. Mike laughs shortly.

"Your secure areas don't seem very fucking secure, Omar."

"It doesn't matter, Michael," Santiago says tersely. "It's done. We waste time doing detective work or we figure out how to stop it now. Get your people together." He rises, fists against the table, and there's more than a little tension in his stance. It could be from any number of things. But Tom suspects that one thing Santiago doesn't hear very often is _no._

And a rejection with absolutely no fear in it. With contempt.

"It's five o' clock in the fucking morning. They're sleeping."

"Get them, Michael." It's a lot more than tension. It's anger. Tom's not sure he's ever actually heard Santiago angry. Probably not many men hear it and tell about it after. "Maybe your time isn't particularly valuable to you, but mine should be."

Mike shrugs. "Whatever." And Florence is tugging him gently away, out through the door and into the tomb-like quiet of the hallway again. She turns to him, hand still on his arm, and he stares back at her.

"He could have gone back."

She makes a gesture that's neither a nod or a shake of the head. _Maybe._ Clearly, it doesn't matter. Clearly what matters is that he said no.

"We need to get out of here, don't we? This place isn't good for him." He pauses, peering into her face. "It isn't good for you." She shakes her head, tugging away again, and though she looks as strong as she ever has, there's a forced quality to the strength, as if she's holding herself up with sheer will alone.

_Poisoned ground and water._

"Come on." He turns, trusting her to follow. "They'll be looking for us."  


* * *

  
Mike finds them before they make it back to the rooms, and he looks at the two of them with slightly narrowed eyes, not quite suspicious but not so far off from it, either. "You're both up early."

"We couldn't sleep."

"Right." Mike looks at him for a little longer, and Tom fights to keep from squirming under that gaze, under all the things he sees in it. But Mike looks away again, sighing. "C'mon, we gotta talk. They're planning to move on something later today and it looks like we gotta be in on it."

It's already in progress when they enter the room again, this time through the main doors. A row of faces turn to look at them as they take their seats at the end of the table; Waters is among them but the rest are soldiers Tom's never seen before. Hitchins isn't among them. He feels a rush of something that might be relief, or might not be at all.

Again the map screen has been replaced with a slide, now showing the face of a man with mousy brown hair and thin glasses, a narrow mouth. He looks tired.

"This is Dr. Gregory Elliot," Santiago says without skipping a beat. "He was one of the lead scientists working on Project Pale Rider. Five years ago he disappeared. Yesterday we received reliable intelligence regarding his location." He turns back to face the table, hands folded together behind his back.

"Elliot may know nothing about this. Or he may know a great deal. In any case, you are going to apprehend him, and you are going to deliver him here, alive." He pauses, seeming to weigh something before speaking again. "We've also received intelligence regarding further outbreaks outside the fence. Pale Horse is spreading. So long as it stays outside the fence, you may think we have no cause for alarm. But gentlemen, there is no guarantee that it will. We stop it out there, and we stop it now."

_Further outbreaks._ He's not sure why he's surprised. It wasn't going to go away on its own. But everything in him seems to stiffen, and when he glances over at Mike, Mike is looking down and away, his expression unreadable. It's so easy to lose sight of. But they've been sheltered, locked up here in comfort and safety. Anything could be going on out there.

"All right, people." Waters is getting to his feet, looking around, and his gaze passes over the three of them as if they weren't there at all. "We hit the road at twelve hundred. Get your gear together and meet outside at ten till."

Out in the hall the other soldiers pass by them, not speaking to them, but Tom feels the looks. At him, at Florence, but mostly at Mike. So many settlements and villages, he's been the one stared at, the one wondered at, whispered about behind people's hands, and now...

He's not the legend, here. No one here is looking to be saved from anything.

Or they weren't.

He's not jealous, he thinks. It's just different. He looks at Mike, finds his eyes wandering down to the odd shape of his mouth and he looks away again. "So."

"Yeah," Mike says. "We should--"

"Pinocchio!"

Mike turns, nonplussed, and Tom follows his gaze to see McDonald striding toward them, eyes wide and eager. "I came up to find you personally. I thought you'd want to see this."

Mike blinks. "See what?"

"We're ready to do the scan. We got the sample out of her this morning."

"We gotta..." Mike glances back at Tom and Florence, and there's something in his eyes, a kind of excitement, as though this is something he's been looking forward to. "What the hell," he says. "C'mon. We got a few hours. This could be really fucking big."

Florence shrugs, but she's looking down and Tom can't see her face clearly. That slump is back in her shoulders, the slump that makes him worry. Whatever else happens, maybe it's good that they're getting out. Like stepping out of a closed room and breathing the air straight from the source, and when did he become able to think of the Realm this way?

Since now, maybe.  


* * *

  
They head back down, back through white corridors under white lights, and they're almost to the room containing OSCAR when Tom opens his mouth and speaks.

"I want to see Kiana."

They all stop and stare at him. McDonald looks faintly nervous, Mike looks confused, but Florence is looking at him with a kind of warmth that he hasn't seen in her eyes since they'd arrived. He knows without having to ask her that she knows who Kiana is. It doesn't matter that she hadn't been with them the day Kiana had been brought in. One way or another, she knows.

McDonald shuffles one foot slightly. "Are you sure? I mean... everyone's ready, we can do the scan and then you can see her after if there's time--"

"No," Tom says firmly. "I want to see her now." He's not sure why it should feel so important, but it does. The feeling of waltzing along, disconnected and ignorant. But she's here, and she's scared and soon, if they can't help her, she'll be dying. So he wants to see her, before they take what they want out of her blood.

Mike looks back at McDonald and nods slightly, a _what can you do_ expression flickering briefly over his face. "Okay," says McDonald, swiping a hand over his face. "Okay, fine. Follow me."

More elevator, more white, and they're entering containment again, stepping through the airlock with a faint rush. Further in, further than Tom had seen the last time he'd been here, each door they pass through equipped with an armed soldier and a scanner, and finally they enter a room with a short row of three cells, the wall facing them made up of a thick glass-like material and a door each set between them. More airlocks, Tom figures. They wouldn't just let anyone enter like any old cell.

McDonald nods shortly to the Guardsman standing against the wall, and the nod is returned. "How's she doing?"

"Coughing since last night," says the man. He's young, though not so young as Hitchins. He looks grim. "It started coming up bloody this morning."

"They put her on a drip?"

"Yeah. But they say it'll only be able to stay in there for a few more days..."

Tom isn't listening anymore. The central cell is the only one that isn't empty, and he steps forward, hands hanging limply at his sides. The girl is lying on a low cot, one arm over her eyes, an IV drip in her other. By the side of the cot is a bucket that he doesn't want to look too hard into.

Kiana stirs, drops her arm, meets his gaze and he feels himself freeze. Her skin is too dark to show at all pale, but there's a flat, unhealthy color to it. There's a strange, slack, expressionless quality to her face. Her eyes are bloodshot.

She coughs once, closing her eyes as though it's painful, and stares at him again. He's not sure he's ever had anyone look at him with so much hatred.

"The fuck're you staring at?" she croaks, and the sound seems to come from slightly above his head. He looks up. Speaker, set into the wall.

"Nothing," he says numbly. "I'm sorry."

"Fuck your sorry." She coughs again, turning and bending with the force of it, and spits something into the bucket. "I don't need it. You come down here for kicks, or what? You get off on this?"

"She's got a nice fuckin' attitude," observes the Guardsman dryly, and Tom glances back in time to see Mike turn on him with a look that blanches his face. Florence is turned a little away, her head bowed. Her hands are shaking just a little, as if they'd like to act on their own. To be in the presence of this kind of sickness and to be idle. Tom feels something cold settle in his gut.

"I don't get off on it. I just wanted to see you." Because it's true. There's not a lot more to say. Kiana snorts a laugh, sits up with her white smock hanging loosely around her bony shoulders.

"Well, get a good fuckin' look, asshole." She coughs again, a thick hacking sound. "While you can."

"Why did you want to see this?" Mike, up close and hissing in his ear and it isn't until the hand gripping his forearm begins to become painful that Tom is aware of it. Being this close again isn't strange in the way he'd thought it would be. "What the fuck for, Hobbes? She's dying, I coulda told you that."

"I just wanted to see," he whispers again, and he can't explain what he's really feeling, that it would have been wrong to take another step towards a solution without bearing witness to the cost. They've been here with their soft beds and hot showers and food whenever they want it, and he's gotten drunk and Mike's fucked a goddamn teenager, and it's ridiculous. It's disgusting, when this is the truth lurking behind it. "I just wanted to see her, Pinocchio, okay?"

Mike mutters something else and steps away. Tom's vision seems to have narrowed, tunneled, until there's nothing in his line of sight but her, her flat face, the burst blood vessels in her eyes. She meets his gaze, entirely unwavering, and he sees the fear there, the fighting. The sheer will to survive. That will is going to go out like a candle in a hard wind and there's nothing he can do.

Not yet.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and he turns and fumbles blindly for the door until Florence takes his hands and guides him.  


* * *

  
Mike is angry at him, or Mike would like to appear to be angry at him. It's clear, anyway, what he's trying to broadcast as his feelings, but Tom doesn't care. He can't care. After what he's just seen, whatever Mike's feelings may or may not be seem entirely inconsequential.

They head back up to OSCAR's room mostly in silence, Tom's numb, Mike's sullen, McDonald's nervous, and Florence's merely silent, as she always is. Once or twice Tom thinks Mike might be about to say something. Then the feeling passes again.

"Well," McDonald says finally as they approach the door with the retinal scanner. He speaks with a kind of forced cheeriness that makes Tom fight to keep from cringing. "Okay, then. Here we are." He bends to the scanner, and when the door hisses open there are already two people inside, a young man and an equally young woman, both bending over the keyboard in front of the terminal. On the table under the white sphere is a thin tube of red fluid, sealed into a clear box.

"Are we all set?"

The woman, a pretty redhead, turns and nods. "Sample's in place. Calibration looks okay. We've corrected for the presence of the tube and the containment unit and human blood. I don't know if it'll be perfect, but it should at least be pretty close."

"All right, then." McDonald rubs his hands together. He already seems more at ease, more focused, and even Mike seems to be perking up a little. All Tom can think about are Kiana's bloodshot eyes.

_This has to be worth it. It just has to be._

"Everyone stand back," says the young man, typing rapidly. "Ready... and we're live."

Again, there's the swelling hum, the detaching plates and the arms, the beams of light. Tom squints as they play over the surface of the tube, seeming to feel it out, probing, and then just as suddenly they vanish again. There's a breathless pause, and then the long string of characters begins to play out across the terminal screen, multiplying and multiplying.

The entire room seems to exhale. Tom looks up at Mike, but Mike's attention is focused on the screen, rapt, and he steps forward. But McDonald and the two others are ahead of him, crowding around the terminal.

"We did it," the man breathes. "We fucking did it."

"It's just a step," says McDonald, bending over the keyboard. "We still have to analyze it, pass it along to the--" He stops, staring at the screen, and Mike steps closer again.

"What? What is it?"

"That... can't be right." There's a sound of frantic typing, and then more silence. Tom can't see the screen at all.

"What the fuck," Mike mutters, reaching out and bodily pushing the staring man and woman aside, and finally the screen is in Tom's line of sight. And he doesn't immediately see anything wrong. The code is unspooling, line by line, neat and orderly and regular.

And then it stops. The screen blinks. And the code begins to unspool again.

"There's no way it can be doing that," McDonald is muttering. "There's just... there's no way."

"You're lookin' at it, genius." Mike stands back and folds his arms, sighing. "They told us there was an issue with the mutation."

"Yeah, well, they were really understating."

"What is it doing?" Tom asks it quietly, almost without any hope of answer, but immediately every eye in the room is on him. Mike looks awkwardly down and to the side, but when McDonald nods slightly he unfolds his arms.

"It's recycling itself. The code is rewriting itself every twenty seconds or so. It's just a little different every time."

Tom feels the numbness seeping back in. Kiana. It's not like he doesn't understand. Maybe he doesn't get the mechanics or the details of it, but he knows what mutation means and he gets the general idea behind Mike's words.

"It's just different enough."

"Just enough." The girl whispers it, looking faintly horrified, eyes locked on the tube as if she's only now understanding what's in it. _Death._ Death, here. It's just a matter of time now.

"No vaccine," Mike says flatly. "No treatment. No nothing." He pauses, rubbing the back of his neck.

"We're fucked."


	4. Outbreak

-11-

"Is that box secure?"

McDonald looks at Mike as if he's being jerked out of a dream, eyes wide and startled. "It's... yeah, it is."

"Unbreakable?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." Mike lifts a hand to his face, rubbing it over his jaw, eyes falling closed for a few seconds. "Okay. We should be fine. But no one else should handle it unless they're suited up. At least gloves and a mask."

McDonald frowns, even through the fear twisting his face. "I don't need you to lecture me on safety regulations, Pinocchio. This is my lab."

"This isn't a goddamn _pissing contest._ Look, fine, whatever. But that thing. That thing is just fucking..." Mike points a finger at the sample and it's trembling very slightly. Something in the room has changed, something fundamental in the atmosphere. There had been so much hope. _It's not worth anything,_ Tom thinks, wishing he was close enough to the wall to sag back against it. _Not worth anything at all._

"We should go." Mike turns, shaking his head, and as he faces them Tom sees how utterly pale he is. Maybe he'd been hoping too much. Maybe they all had. It was supposed to work. Something to overturn the idea that the infected are better off shot on the spot.

_Kiana._

"You go," Tom says. "I'm going back to see her again."

Mike turns on him, face dark and incredulous. "Why the fuck?"

"Because I need to." Tom stares back at him. In a sick way he's grateful for all this. Last night feels entirely meaningless now. "She's dying, Mike. Isn't that reason enough?"

Mike looks at him for a few seconds, mouth working slightly, and finally he huffs out an exasperated sigh and turns back to the door again. "Fine. Just be outside and ready with the rest of us."

Florence touches Mike's arm, inclines her head towards Tom. _I'm with him._ Mike holds her gaze, then shakes his head and sighs again. The door hisses open and they follow him out. Behind them Tom hears the girl muttering to herself.

"Just different enough. Oh Jesus. Jesus Christ."  


* * *

  
The Guardsman seems mildly surprised to see them again, but he steps back to give them space, and in a few seconds he's retreated into the background again, and Tom only has eyes for the thin girl behind the glass, staring dully back at him. He feels Florence beside him, and in a vague way he's grateful for her. In another sense she doesn't really matter. He would be here regardless.

"Couldn't get enough, huh." Kiana muffles a cough behind her fist, wiping it on her smock. It leaves a thin red stain behind. "Fine with me. I got nothing but time, asshole."

"We just ran your sample," Tom says. He's not sure what else to say. He's not sure if she'll even know what he's talking about. But something in her eyes flashes and she seems to sit up a little straighter.

"Yeah? And?"

Tom drops his eyes and for a moment or two he isn't sure he's going to be able to answer. Though he owes her an answer. He owes her that if nothing else. He didn't take her from her home, he didn't slaughter her family, and he didn't make them sick to begin with, but he's here, he's sleeping in Santiago's bed and eating his food and he might just as easily be wearing the same uniform as the man behind him.

He's always tried to be a good soldier. He's always tried. _We are all guilty. There's no one innocent who carries a gun._

"It didn't work," he says softly. "It's not... it just didn't work."

"Oh." The faint light in her face dies abruptly and she looks down at her knees. But the rage seems to have died out of her as well. There's not a truce between them, Tom wouldn't assume it, but at least hostilities are on a kind of hold.

Though he would have almost preferred it. They'd told her they could use her to help people. Mike had told her. They must have told her that they could save her with her own blood. And it's not true. And she sees it, without him having to say any more.

She reaches up, tugs at the tight curls of her hair with no real object. "So what's gonna happen to all the people?"

"I don't know." Tom's vision blurs and he looks away, blinking a little. She's so small, so young. Somewhere, he has a child of his own who he's never seen, never held. Kiana is just a child and there's no one to hold her now.

"They're gonna die." She says it flatly, in a way that invites no argument or contradiction, as if Tom would be prepared to offer her any. She nods at Florence, standing a little behind him. "Why doesn't she talk?"

Tom glances back at her, as if looking for some clue to a response, a clue that isn't there and never has been. "She just doesn't. She never has."

"She's one of those women, isn't she? The healer women." Kiana stands, tottering slightly, and takes a step towards the transparent wall. "Why doesn't she do something?" Her voice is rising. "Why doesn't she fucking help me?"

"She can't..." Tom whispers, but it feels like a sorry excuse and the words die on his lips. He can't see Florence but somehow he doesn't need to. He can feel her, like she's inside his head, and it's almost overpowering.

"Why the hell can't she?" Kiana leans against the glass and coughs, and a thin line of blood slips down her chin. Her nose is bleeding. Her eyes are red, redder then even when he'd last seen her. "I just wanted..." She makes a quiet sobbing noise and slips down to the floor, one hand on the glass. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

_No, it wasn't._ Nothing he has or knows or can say is equal to this. "I'm sorry," he whispers again, and hates himself for the words.

"Sir." He turns and the Guardsman is beside him, reaching out to touch his shoulder. "I think maybe you should get the lady out of here." He turns further and stares. He hadn't heard her, of course he hadn't, why would he? But Florence is slumped against the wall, arms wrapped around her middle, crying so hard that she's shaking. He's never seen her cry like that. He's never seen her cry at all.

"Florence... hey." He reaches for her and she collapses against him, face burrowing into his shoulder. The man is right; he has to get her out of here. Way out of here. She should never have been here to begin with.

"Thank you," he manages to say to the Guardsman as he helps the two of them out, and when he glances back Kiana is still on the floor, palm flat against the glass as if seeking to touch someone who isn't there.  


* * *

  
He manages to get her out of containment and then they both go down together, onto the floor with the oppressive whiteness of the hallway all around them. The light is too bright so he closes his eyes and holds her, and after a time he feels her beginning to still.

"You didn't have to come," he says softly, his hand moving slowly and aimlessly over her back. "You don't have to do that to yourself."

She pulls back and looks at him, her face red and tear-streaked, but her eyes are still hard and clear, and her expression is clear as well. _Yes, I did. You did._

He doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything at all. His hand keeps moving and he settles back against the wall. "I don't know what's going to happen now."

She shakes her head slowly, but for once he's not sure if she's agreeing or trying to deny something. But he doesn't think she would know. For all her power, she never claimed to read the future.

Except in one place.

"You think I'm special," he says, hesitant, and after a few seconds, also hesitant, she nods. "Why?"

She reaches out and lays her hand against his chest, over his heart, and then moves up, her palm cool against his brow. _Your heart. Your mind._

"I'm not special," he says, and he's said it so many times over the years, to crowds, to individuals, to himself. "I'm just a man. People think I'm more than that, I'm just gonna let them down in the end." And for a while it had been a means to an end. But he still remembers the shooting. The screams. The burning tents and buildings.

Florence shakes her head again, cupping his cheek in her hand. She was there. She knows. He doesn't know how she can still believe. He takes her wrist but he doesn't pull her hand away. He wonders what someone would think, to find them here together, half sprawled on the floor and more than a little tangled.

He doesn't care what they'd think. Very soon, it might not matter anymore what anyone thinks about anything. What will it be like, when all the minds creating this world go dark and silent? What will it look like to watch a world fade and vanish, line by line and character by character?

_If we should live so long._

"Come on," he says, slowly getting to his feet and reaching down to offer her a hand. She takes it and rises, slow as well but graceful in that way she always is, and when she gets her boots under her she looks steadier. Almost normal again.

But he can see the collapse still threatening under her surface. They can't stay here much longer.

"We should go," he says, looking back down the hall towards their exit. "We should... get packed, I guess." Though he's not sure what he has to pack. It's not like he's even unpacked to begin with. This place has never felt like a home or a place to settle. He's starting to realize how much he's itching to move on.

Even through the fear of what they might find.  


* * *

  
"Hitchins." He meets the man in the hallway outside his room, and Hitchins looks up sharply at the sound of his voice, flushing bright and immediately. Maybe he'd been heading for Mike's room. Maybe not. Tom is discovering that he doesn't particularly care.

"I—Hobbes. Hi." He takes a step back and rubs the back of his neck with one hand, looking about as uncomfortable as Tom has ever seen anyone. "You're heading out this afternoon, right?"

Tom nods. It's hard to hear Hitchins's voice, now, and not think about what he sounds like when he's coming. _Like a goddamn train wreck,_ Tom thinks, but that isn't really right. Not exactly. "In a couple hours. Look, Hitchins..." He doesn't have the patience for awkwardness and even if he did he's far too tired for it. "I got a dog in there. Dexter. Is there any way you can feed him while I'm gone? Take him outside now and then?"

"Oh." Hitchins blushes again, and Tom's worried for a moment that he might say no, but then he's nodding, red but nodding. "Yeah, I can do that."

"Thanks." Tom nods towards his door. "I gotta..."

"Yeah. Hobbes." And he stops Tom with his hand on the door handle. "I'm..." And then he shakes his head. "Sorry. Never mind."

_Sorry I was a porn movie soundtrack in your room last night,_ Tom thinks, and somehow he almost laughs. "Okay, Hitchins. Okay."  


* * *

  
When he finally steps outside with Florence behind him, there's already a small crowd waiting, ten or twelve men in their olive green uniforms, red berets bright in the thin sun. There's three humvees parked at the base of the steps, and though it's clearly a military operation, Tom is reminded absurdly of a school day trip. _Now everyone find a partner and hold hands._

His gaze flicks to Mike, leaning against one of the vehicles with his old clothes on and a pack over his shoulder, and flicks away again. He and Florence are also dressed in the clothes they'd brought. It's a feeling of returning, of being unable to take along what they'd been given. It doesn't feel like his, doesn't even feel exactly real, like if he took it past the fence it might turn to ash and blow away.

_And wouldn't that be embarrassing._

He steps forward, hitching his own pack higher on his shoulder, and draws up beside Mike. "So how're they letting us do this, anyway? They didn't take the chips out."

Mike shrugs. "Tech these days, they can just reprogram them remotely." He nods to Waters, standing a few yards away and talking to two other soldiers, and his face twists sourly. "They gave him a thing. Like a portable tracker. As long as we stay close to him..." He sighs and looks away again. "I'd like to get close, all right," he mutters. "Foot-up-his-ass close."

Tom regards him carefully. There's something that he's seeing here, and he's been seeing it since they got here. "You really don't like him. I mean, really. Like you knew him from before." He looks back at Waters and thinks about Sarajevo, about the roar of the bombers and the trembling of the two of them, huddled together and waiting for impact, and just before the bombs fell Tom whispered to him that everything would be okay.

Things change.

"Yeah, well." Mike smirks faintly and shrugs again. "He was a little kiss-ass who always wanted my job. Hope he's fucking happy now."

"Yeah," Tom says, looking down at his boots. Part of him wants to forgive. Part of him. Another part of him, a part he hadn't even known existed until this place, wants to knock Waters onto the ground and stand on his throat and watch his face turn purple. "Me too."

"All right!" Waters steps away from the small circle of Guardsmen and raises his voice. "Listen up. We move out in five. You've all been apprised of the situation. You know your jobs. We get out there, we get this guy and we get back in one piece." He takes a step towards the lead humvee. "Let's roll!"

The three of them are piled into the back of the middle vehicle, but not before Tom glances behind them and sees white plastic bundles being loaded into the trunk. He glances at Mike questioningly.

"Hazmat suits," Mike says simply, and looks out the window.

Tom closes his eyes. So it's real, now.  
-12-

He holds his breath when they pass through the fence, and he remembers when he was a boy, holding his breath to pass a graveyard. Holding his breath so no ghosts could enter his body. In his mind, those ghosts had never had the power to make him bleed.

Long before they reach the fence they've left the more thickly populated areas behind and as the road unfolds in front of them the land passing becomes long stretches of open field, dotted with copses of naked trees. On one level it's jarring, after so many days and nights of gleaming towers and pavement. On another, it's like coming home, and once the fence is far behind them he lets out a sigh and feels something deep inside him begin to relax.

Relax. That should be funny. He might not have believed it, a week ago.

"So how far are we going?" he asks quietly, following Mike's gaze out the window. Mike shrugs.

"A ways. Probably gonna take about a day." He pauses and glances at Florence, and it might not mean anything, and then again it might. "We're going west."

He remembers. _The badlands._ "Is that bad?"

"I dunno." Mike looks out the window again, broken fenceposts whipping by into a blur. "Maybe. We'll see."

Tom sits back, leans his head against the seat and closes his eyes, tries to sleep. Tiredness is such a constant state by now that he notices it when he doesn't feel it far more than when he does. But this feels like an even deeper kind of weary, the kind that works its way into his bones and seems to scoop out the marrow, leaving him hollow and tottering. Being outside the fence is a relief. It's also the only real relief he has now.

He's sitting next to Mike, pressed against him by the cramped space of the humvee, their knees and hips touching. Close quarters is something new and it shouldn't even be worth remarking on. He should be able to lean his head on Mike's shoulder and sleep if he needs to.

But he doesn't.

_We should talk._ What about? They'd been drunk, both of them. It's amazing he even remembers it. Drunk, tired, missing Sophie, and he hadn't even meant to. Accident, completely. Maybe Mike doesn't remember, anyway.

He sure as hell doesn't seem to care.

Mike has fallen into and out of a lot of beds since he's known him and maybe that's all this was, all Hitchins was, just a quick drunken grope and then meaning nothing the next day.

But he can't get away from Mike's face. The mortification. The utter _oh, shit_ look of him. It had almost been funny. If he'd been watching from outside he might have laughed. His own face. The initial confusion. He's never kissed a man. He never thought it would feel quite like that. He's not sure what he'd imagined it would feel like.

_People are just more complicated than that._

He opens one eye a slit and the wall of a house passes in the window, just the wall and nothing else, the edges of it blacked with fire. He thinks he sees a shape huddled in the grass beside it. He might have imagined it. He closes his eyes again and the wall is gone, as gone as the house is. After a while the hum of the engine and the murmur of conversation from the front seat is gone as well, and then everything else follows. The line between waking and dreaming is thinner and thinner these days. Just another fence to pass through as though it weren't even there.  


* * *

  
They stop to eat dinner by the side of the road, men setting up portable stoves and cracking open packets of rations, heating things in small pots. Tom stands dully in the center of it all, looking around and wondering how this can feel so familiar and so strange both at once. He's not really a soldier anymore. What's a soldier without an army?

"You should eat," Mike says from behind him and a little way to the side. "Won't get too many chances for a while."

"I'm not hungry." He looks off to the left; Florence, leaning against one of the cars with her arms over her bent knees. She's not eating either.

Mike rolls his eyes and steps away again. "Fine. Just gonna kick your ass later, if you start gnawing on my arm."

Tom smiles thinly. "Too bad I left the mutt at home, right?"

Mike looks back at him, expression mildly surprised. "Hey, yeah, you did. How's he gonna eat?"

Tom shrugs. "Hitchins is feeding him." Casual, very casual, and yet he finds himself watching Mike's face closely. Not sure what he's looking for. Something. Mike's eyes narrow just a touch.

"Is he." Something that might be in the same ballpark as a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth before it lets go again. "Huh. Okay." And he turns without another word, crouches down with a group of Guard, engaging with them in clipped, one-word statements. But Tom catches a glance from him, a strange little smile.

He doesn't like discomfort when he's not sure where it's coming from.

He moves over to Florence, sits down beside her and watches the sun sinking behind the trees, the light still greasy and colorless, just as it had been. She doesn't look at him immediately, and when she does she looks tired, as though she hadn't slept in all their time in the city. Perhaps she hadn't. It's not like he really has any way of knowing.

"What can you tell me about the west?"

She looks at him a little more directly, her eyes widening just a touch. Her expression is unusually hard to read, not because she's holding anything back, but because what's passing over her face is a flurry of things, so fast and so flickering that it's difficult to pin any of them down. Finally she looks down again and shrugs, giving him a faint, wry smile.

_You know I can't tell you much of anything._

"I know." He returns the smile, briefly, and leans back again, hands on his knees. The land all around them feels very big, very open. They haven't seen another person since they set out. "Just... the way Pinocchio and Santiago were talking about it..."

He doesn't turn his head again but he can feel her looking at him, and finally she touches his forearm to get his attention, moving her hands through the air in parallel curves, and he sees that she's making a shape. It takes him a second or two to get it, but then he does.

A mushroom cloud.

"Another bomb?" he asks, his voice hushed, and she nods. "A nuke?"

She half-shakes her head, twists her mouth. _Not quite._

"A dirty bomb?"

She holds up a finger. And then four more. Tom exhales heavily. "Jesus."

Poisoned ground and water. _The badlands._ There had been a lot of hazmat suits. He had assumed they were in case they ran into Pale Horse. Now he wonders.

He's glad Dexter is back on the other side of the fence.

It's twilight when they start to drive again. He had expected that they might stop for the night, and perhaps eventually they will, but they drive on through the darkening world, and while Tom had dozed before, now he can't still his mind. He's seen so much darkness here, so much death, and yet it had somehow escaped him, the idea that he might encounter something worse. He glances at Mike in the dimness, and something flashes in Mike's eyes, lighting the pupils for an instant in yellow-gold, like an animal's. Tom shivers.

Eventually the movement of the car overrides his racing thoughts and he must be deep in a doze when they stop again, but it jolts him up and out, because the stop is abrupt, the brakes squealing and the humvee in front of them suddenly looming huge and headight-bright in the windshield. Tom opens his eyes wide, looking around, dull and confused even as he feels his deeper instincts waking up and engaging.

"Fucking hell," mutters one of the soldiers in front, and the radio crackles, but there's still no clue as to why they've stopped. Tom is about to break what feels like some kind of implicit rule and ask, when Florence grabs at his shoulder and he turns instinctively, looking out her window.

Palely lit in the glow of the headlights is a deer. Tom thinks it's a deer. He's pretty sure. But it's a deer gone horribly wrong, blinking at them with bulbous, milky eyes, its snout open and raw and showing the nasal passages. Its fur is patchy and rough as if eaten away by some kind of mange, its body skeletal, and its legs are grotesquely long and spindly, and Tom isn't sure how they're even supporting its weight. It wobbles slightly, its tongue lolling from where its cheeks should be, and then it turns and lopes off into the darkness, its tail up and white and pure in the midst of everything else.

"What was wrong it with?" Tom whispers. "What the fuck was _wrong_ with it?"

Mike shakes his head mutely and Tom turns to him, mouth open, numb with horror. He's never seen anything like that before.

"Mike..."

"It's the badlands," Mike says simply, his voice flat, and turns away again. "Don't worry. It won't live that long."

When they stop again, half of the Guardsmen set up a perimeter, and the three of them are among those permitted to sleep. But Tom doesn't sleep. He lies awake on the cold ground and stares up into the darkness, the moon staring back like a single blind, milky eye.  


* * *

  
The next day they start early, though no one has to rouse Tom. He sits up, blinking, gathers up his bedroll and in ten minutes he's back in the humvee, staring out the window. He's eaten, at least, just a packet of dry rations, tasting like wood chips, but it's something, and it's so like the chow he's used to from years before that it's almost comforting.

He needs comfort. The world outside the car is beginning to change. It's changed already, only the night before, in the darkness, he hadn't seen it. The trees are still there, but they're twisted, stunted and gnarled, and more and more they look burned. Besides them, there's only the grass, miles and miles of it, dry and colorless and if it were summer it would look ready to burst into flame. Since the deer they've seen no animals, and he's grateful for that.

There's no sign of life anywhere. Not until they stop in the late morning for a meal and a piss, and a few yards off the side of the road there's a house. Intact. No sign of destruction, no fire. Tom stares at it for a short time, glances over at the Guardsman closest to him.

"Is anyone gonna care if I check it out?"

The man looks placidly back at him and shrugs. Tom looks around, catches sight of Waters. It shouldn't take him too far. But he has to see. Mike and Florence are with another group, scarfing down cold rations. If he goes quickly they might not notice that he's gone at all. Normally he would want them to come with him. But now, for reasons he doesn't fully understand, he wants to go alone.

The house is intact. He hadn't realized how strange that is until now.

The boards of the porch creak as he walks up onto it, and when he tries the front door it's open. The foyer is silent, eerie, the stairs leading up to the second floor are cast in shadow and the silence coming down the staircase like cold air feels even thicker and more oppressive. He glances through the doorway on his right; a living room, couch and chairs and glass coffee table, all covered with a thick layer of dust, all untouched. Not even looted.

He feels a shiver of disquiet run through him and steps through the door to his left, into the dining room. A small table, simple wood, a checked tablecloth. Four places set, four chairs. Four plates, covered with the crusted and mummified remains of a shared meal. The glasses are cloudy with long-evaporated liquid. There's nothing left to rot. Whatever could have did so a long time ago.

He takes a step backward and stops dead when his boot comes into contact with something that feels like neither floor or furniture, something that snaps dryly. He turns. The remains of a dog, what looks like it had been a border collie, scraps of faded black and white fur still clinging to the bones. It had been lying here by the table, maybe waiting for scraps, and something had happened. Something.

There's a rustle at one of the windows, a pane broken out, and he looks up and sees a crow sitting there, staring back at him with beady black eyes. It has three legs, the two normal enough but for where the left one branches into another limb, single-clawed, twisted and useless and dangling at its side. It hops to the right, caws a raspy cry. It turns its head and its beak is weirdly notched at the side, as if it had started to grow in another direction before changing its mind.

Tom turns and walks out of the house. He finds Mike, settles down beside him, unable to look at him. He stares down at his hands.

"This wasn't a dirty bomb, was it." It's not a question. "It was something worse."

Mike finishes chewing the last of his food and then for a time he's silent. Tom is about to get up, walk away again, maybe get back in the car and just sit and wait for this to all get moving again, when Mike finally speaks.

"It started out as a dirty bomb." He shakes his head slightly. "Turned into something else. It was a bug. It didn't pan out in the code like they expected." He looks at Tom and smile wryly. "Ten minutes later the suitcase nuke in New York City went off. They got that one right, anyway."

"Oh." Tom looks up at the house, the ghost house, not even the bodies of the inhabitants left to show they'd been there. He feels absurdly like crying. "Are we safe? Like... can we be here?"

Mike shrugs. "As long as you don't eat or drink anything. The air... the air is probably okay." He smiles coldly. "And even if it's not... you think it makes a whole lot of difference at this point?"

Tom doesn't answer that. It's something that all three of them know, but he feels sure somehow that the others don't. Whether it had been too soon before their departure to get the word out that a vaccine is impossible... or whether Santiago has simply chosen to keep the information to himself. Who knows.

And that truly doesn't matter.

They get back into the humvees and drive away, and Tom looks up at the mirror and watches the house until it vanishes over the horizon and is gone.  


* * *

  
It's early afternoon when they stop again, and Tom is puzzled. It's too soon for another break, and the land around them is still dead and featureless, with fire scars here and there in the grass, blackened and burned away to the ground, still bare where new growth should have covered it a long time ago. Mike steps out of the humvee and Tom follows, looking around, wondering, Florence behind him. Ahead of them, by the lead vehicle, most of the Guardsmen have already gathered around Waters.

"Okay, it's just two klicks that way." And he nods off to what Tom had assumed was another small stand of trees, but now that he's close it's clearly bigger, even a small forest, extending far off the road. "We move out, we stay close and quiet. All we know is that he's there. We don't know anything about what's waiting for us. So go soft, and stop the second you get to anything that doesn't look right."

As the other Guardsmen start to head off towards the trees, Waters sees them, beckons them closer, glares at them when they reach him. "You go too," he says. "We're not giving you weapons, so stick close to someone who has one. And watch your asses."

"Really," Mike says, and he looks darkly amused. "Whatever you say. Major."

Waters shoots him a poisonous look but Mike is already striding away. Tom shrugs, gives Waters a thin smile and follows. He can't say that part of him doesn't enjoy Mike's needling. A little. As long as he's not the target.

A few minutes of dry, scrubby grass and then they're in among the trees, the tops low and tangled, and even though there's not a single leaf to be seen, it's darker here, as though the meager sunlight still can't filter its way down through the boughs. Tom looks around them, his hands suddenly feeling alarmingly empty with no gun to grip, and he catches Florence and Mike fidgeting in similar ways. Ahead of them he can see olive green, moving slowly through the trees, guns drawn and held at the ready. But the three of them are behind, far behind, and Mike doesn't seem terribly interested in catching up.

Tom hisses softly to catch his attention, wincing when a twig under his boot snaps loudly.

"Shouldn't we do what he said? Join up with someone who's actually armed?" He doesn't like Waters, he'll be the first person to admit that, but the truth is that it had sounded like at least a halfway decent idea. But Mike is shaking his head.

"We hang back, circle around the side, get in front of them. Stay close to me."

Tom stares at him. "But he just said... Pinocchio, I don't really wanna _die_ out here. I know how I make it look sometimes, but..."

Mike snorts a soft laugh. "We won't die, you fuckin' pussy." He nods to Florence and starts to move to the side, stepping softly as he can, though everything around them is so dead and dry that it almost crackles at the touch of a breath. "I know this guy. We worked together for a while."

"Elliot?" Tom remembers the narrow mouth, the thin, ungenerous face. "And you're sure he's here."

"I'm sure." Mike pauses and looks around, cocks his head, and Tom gets the sense that he's listening for something, before he moves on again. "This is where he always wanted to go. Creepy little motherfucker."

"The badlands?"

"He wanted to study the bomb's effects on animals." Mike's mouth twists wryly. "He woulda been shit outta luck with people. None of them left."

Tom feels something twist in his gut. The empty chairs, the meals half-eaten. The way the chairs had been pulled back, as if to make space for a person to sit in them, only there was no one at all. "Why not?"

Mike shrugs. "Just how it worked out. No one totally understands it."

Tom goes silent again. There are questions he wants to ask. How far south and west does it extend? What's happened to all the cities beyond this point, all the people? Is Colorado poisoned? Utah? Nevada? California?

He thinks about California and his throat tightens, until he pushes the thought away and he can breathe again.

He can still hear the Guardsmen moving off a few yards through the trees, but the sound here is strangled, twisted and turned through the dead wood until he's not entirely sure what direction anything is coming to him from. It would be easy to get lost in a wood like this, with any clearing or break in the treeline long since vanished, but Mike moves ahead with an intent and a confidence that Tom finds hard to believe. Unless Mike's been here before. Unless he's been exactly here.

He doesn't see the dead squirrel until he almost walks into it.

A tiny head, dried skin and patchy fur stretched over a rodent skull, its mouth wide and gaping as if in pain and its eyes long since plucked out or rotted away. It's dangling in front of him by its tail and he finds himself face to grisly face with it before he entirely knows what's happening. For a moment he stands absolutely still, feeling adrenaline pound through his body, and then he gulps once, twice, hard, and steps back, looking around for Mike and Florence. And then he sees the others.

The low branches of the trees are full of them, the dessicated carcasses of creatures hanging like some kind of grotesque fruit. Tom swallows again, fighting back an entirely irrational and powerful panic. "Mike," he whispers, looks ahead and Mike has stopped, turned, staring at him with mild irritation.

"Come the fuck on, GI. You're slowing us up."

"What's with the menagerie?" Tom whispers, once he's managed to get his legs working and he's close again.

"Told you he was a creepy little motherfucker," Mike says, and chuckles softly. "Seriously, I dunno. It could be a warning, him trying to scare people away. Or it could be part of his research."

"Some research," Tom mutters, and Mike chuckles again.

"What's the matter, Pollyanna? Not your kinda Christmas ornaments?" But Tom looks ahead and Florence is walking exactly as she had back in the city, with her shoulders hunched, her body radiating discomfort. It's the death, Tom realizes. The deadness of everything. Really, the two places are far too similar.

Even without the dead animals on the trees.

Off to the right, Tom hears a soft grunt and a curse, though how far away it is hard to tell. But it's to the right, he's almost sure... and a little behind. Mike looks up and smiles, though it's tight and humorless. "Good," he murmurs. "We got a few minutes on 'em." He glances back at Tom. "Pick up the pace. I need more time."

The animals hanging from the trees grow more numerous. Crows, squirrels, foxes with their red fur faded and bedraggled. Here and there an opossum. Gradually the horror fades, and it's replaced by a deep, ridiculous melancholy. They're sad little things, most of them with more of the strange mutations he's seen, extra and useless legs, blind eyes, where the eyes remain at all, oversized heads and jaws with snaggled, crooked teeth. Tom sighs, fighting back another shiver, and he understands even better why Florence walks with her shoulders hunched, as if fighting the force of a wind that only she can feel.

But then she isn't walking anymore, and neither is Mike, and Tom stares down at what they're bent over, Mike pushing aside some twigs and ancient, dried leaves.

It's a hatch, set into the ground, metal with a handle and what looks like a keypad at one end. Mike tugs once at the handle, fruitlessly, and then drops into a crouch, glancing behind them, rubbing his jaw.

"You need a code?" Tom asks quietly, wondering how long it'll take for the Guardsmen to find them. But Mike looks up and smiles. "I know the code." And his hand moves over the keys, with no more hesitation than he'd showed in leading them here, and there's a soft hissing sound. Mike takes hold of the handle again, and this time the hatch opens as easily as if it had never been locked. Tom peers into it.

It's a long hole leading down, down past the point where he can make it out, with rungs set into one side. Very faintly, some inestimable distance down, he thinks he can see the glow of a light.

Mike nods. "C'mon. Quick, before they find it."

The rungs are slippery but they move down onto them, and Mike pulls the hatch shut behind them. Tom is expecting them to be cast back into total blackness, but now he can definitely see a light at the bottom, though it's still impossible to judge the distance with any precision. "How the hell did you find this place?" he whispers, looking up at Mike's boots descending towards him.

"We built this place," Mike says softly, and Tom feels no surprise at all. "It was supposed to be a research station. But it kinda never happened."

"Why not?"

"Lotta reasons. Santiago started cutting budgets for research that didn't directly have to do with weaponry. Pale Rider being a bust didn't help any." Mike looks down and Tom sees his eyes glittering in the dim light. "Not that many people even remember this place is here."

"But he did." Tom swallows. "And you did." He pauses. The light is getting closer. "Will they know the code?"

"Hope not. But I think we gotta assume they will. Or they can hack it. Hurry it up down there."

They reach the bottom after what seems like another short eternity, and Tom can feel the tension in his legs as he steps off the rungs, looking around. Ahead of them stretches a long, whitewashed tunnel, lit by dim overhead fluorescents. Tom feels Mike prod him gently in the back and he starts to walk.

It seems longer than it is, and at the end of it there's a door. Metal, like the hatch, and also with a keypad. Tom is waiting for Mike to reach out, tap in some other code, but Mike shakes his head and glances back at Florence. "Can't. I mean, I could. But he knows we're here." He smiles thinly. "Wouldn't be polite to just barge in there." He reaches up and pounds hard on the door, sending great echoing booms of sound through the tunnel and through the door into unknown chambers beyond. There's a pause, a long one, and Mike is just raising his fist to pound again when the door swings open, surprisingly fast for how large it is and how heavy it must be, and a man is looking back at them with a warily expectant expression on his thin face. The glasses, the narrow mouth and the brown, mussed hair. Tom's only seen him once, not even in person, but it's clear who it is.

"Colonel." The man takes a step back, but there's nothing nervous about the movement. His stance is of a man who clearly knows he's on his own ground. "You brought friends. I wasn't expecting that."

"Hi, Greg," Mike says, amiably. "Can we come in? We kinda need to talk."  
-13-

"I didn't expect to see you at all, I have to say," says Elliot, straightening some papers on the low table in the middle of the room. It's a wide chamber with a low ceiling and sloping walls, a cot in the corner, a hotplate on a table, one wall lined with shelves, in turn lined with canned goods. Pots and pans. Bookshelves. Three monitors and a tangled pile of computer equipment, and a small TV showing multiple camera angles, one of them displaying the four of them. Another narrow tunnel, leading off into other chambers that can't be seen. "They said you were dead."

Mike shrugs and smiles faintly. "You believed them?"

Elliot snorts. "Not for a minute. But that was the... eh... official party line." He takes a seat by the table, folding his hands in his lap. He's wearing a pair of jeans, worn but clean, a flannel shirt. Still the same thin glasses, which he pushes higher on his nose before his hands join in his lap again. "I'm relieved. You inspired a few of us, leaving like you did. It's good to see you didn't come to some, eh, unfortunate end."

"And what happened to the others?"

Elliot shrugs and shakes his head. "Who knows? It wasn't as though we left in a group. We were... scattered. Disorganized. None of us thought to oppose Santiago in any way, it was just a case of wanting to be... out. Gone. Away from him." He smiles and looks around the chamber. "This seemed like it was far away enough."

"But it's not," Tom says, speaking for the first time. He takes a cautious step forward. "They're up there, looking for this place."

"I know." Elliot nods, seeming entirely unconcerned. "And they will find it. Eventually." He cocks his head, curious, looking at Florence where she stands close to the door, right hand holding her left arm, looking around as though she's waiting for something to leap out and bite her. "What is she?"

Mike's eyes narrow. "She's Florence. You don't need to know anything else."

"She's very quiet, isn't she? My dear." Elliot holds out a hand to her, smiling again. "You don't have to be so afraid. Nothing down here will harm you."

"She's not afraid," Tom says, a little tightly. Somehow it feels like an insult that he has to push back. "Maybe she just doesn't like it."

Elliot half shrugs. "She can suit herself. Now. Colonel, why don't you tell me what brings you out here." He leans forward over the table and folds his hands together. "Because you don't expect me to believe that this is just a little social call."

"It's not." Mike takes a seat opposite, turning the chair around and leaning over the back with a kind of exaggerated casualness. "Pale Horse, Elliot."

Elliot's eyes go very slightly wider. He seems to catch himself, face carefully composed and placid, but Tom sees it. A glance at Mike and he's sure he's seen it too. Elliot clears his throat lightly. "What about it?"

"Come on." Mike leans a little further forward. "It's just us here, Greg. For now. You know they don't get it, they're just fucking grunts. They're not gonna appreciate the scope of what we worked on. But I get it. You know I do. What else do you know?"

"It didn't work," Elliot says flatly. "It didn't work and we locked it up and no one ever touched it again."

"No one?" Mike smiles, calm and a little bemused. "Really. So you don't know anything about what's going on..." He waves a hand vaguely at the ceiling. "Up there."

"I don't. Why, what's going on up there?"

Mike gets up. He does it hard and abruptly, shoving the chair into the table with considerable force, and in spite of his carefully composed exterior Elliot jumps. "We don't have time for this," Mike says, leaning forward over the table again, and his voice is still level and calm. "They're coming for you, they're gonna be here soon, and once they have you we both know you're not gonna give them anything. But you can give me something. You got a chance here to balance the scales a little. Don't fucking blow it, Greg."

Elliot looks back at him for what feels like a long time. A chime sounds, faint, pleasant, and all of them except Elliot look up and towards the ceiling, instinctive. None of them have to be told what it means.

"Why should I tell you?" Something in Elliot's face has changed. It's harder, thinner, his mouth even more narrow, and while there's still a determined calmness about him, all the pleasant aspect of before has faded entirely. "What would you do with it? It's not like it'll even help, Colonel, you know that. We couldn't ever stop it. It's like a dragon. It'll eat the world."

"You know," Tom murmurs, and it's just what they've all been sure of. Transparent as anything could be. He steps up behind Mike, close, hands clenched into fists at his sides.

"I have a sample."

"From a victim?" Mike shakes his head. "So do we. Big fuckin' deal."

"No, you don't understand." Elliot smiles grimly. Another chime, louder and somehow more insistent, and when Tom glances at the TV screen he sees Guardsmen in the tunnel outside. "I have a _sample._"

Tom feels his mouth go dry. Behind him, Florence inhales lightly. Tom looks on the table, and Mike's knuckles are white. "Who?" Mike whispers. "Who gave it to you?"

Elliot opens his mouth and then there's a third chime, this one both loud and grating, and Tom feels it sending shivers down his spine, like nails on a chalkboard. "They're coming through," Elliot says, sounding strangely distant. "I swore I wouldn't go back. I swore..." He looks up at Mike and laughs. "They're just going to kill me anyway."

"Greg. _Who?_"

"It doesn't matter." Elliot leans back in his chair and slips his hands into his pockets. "You know we're all dead anyway. You knew it the second we made the damn thing."

"Greg, so help me Jesus..."

The door swings open. Guardmen spill into the room, a few of them dropping to their knees, guns out and held and ready to fire. Tom turns to look at them in a kind of daze and he sees that all of them are wearing respirator masks. Mike whirls, holds out his hands and yells "_No!_" And then several things happen at once and Tom somehow seems to see all of them, a whirl of images so confused and fused that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, or what order they happen in, or whether they happen in any order at all. Thick smoke billows into the room, the lights flicker, the chime is sounding low and loud and threatening. The TV screen goes dark. Elliot pulls his hand out of his pocket and through the smoke and the flickering light there's a glitter of something thin and sharp. Florence is crumpling to her knees, her hand over her mouth and nose. Mike is leaning heavily on the table, coughing so hard he's almost retching. But Elliot isn't coughing. Tom can somehow see him clearly, and Elliot is meeting his gaze, calm and clear, and through the chaos and the noise Tom can hear him when he speaks.

"There's nothing here to save."

He lifts the glittering thing in his hands—a medical syringe tipped with a needle—and slides it easily into the side of his own neck. There's a blur in the smoke as Mike reaches for him and then a flicker, a swell of light and nothing at all. All the air seems to squeeze itself out of Tom's lungs and he stumbles and goes down, the floor very cool under his cheek. All the lights might go out or it might just be him losing consciousness, and either way he doesn't suppose it matters very much. Like the man said.

_There's nothing here to save._


	5. Mutation

-14-

"What the _fuck_ was that?"

Mike is sitting up against one of the tunnel walls, his voice hoarse, and at the last syllable he breaks off into another round of deep, harsh coughing. Florence is sitting next to him, head tilted back, breathing in rough, drawn-out gasps. Tom is wondering if he'll get that far, He can barely cough, his chest is so tight, and his eyes won't stop watering.

"Oh, fuck off, Pinocchio," Waters says, glaring down at them. "This wasn't your mission. We didn't know what was waiting for us down here."

"You _failed_ your mission," Mike rasps, glaring right back. "Your target is dead. Good fuckin' job, _Major._"

"We couldn't have known that was coming." Waters is turning slightly red, and through the haze of trying to get his breath back, Tom can see the unease behind his eyes. Mike is right: the target is dead, and now Waters has to go back to Santiago and explain exactly how that happened.

"So you're only responsible for the shit you can anticipate." Mike looks up at him, voice dripping with contempt before it dissolves back into coughing again. "That's... you're fucking pathetic, Waters."

Waters's boot connects with Mike's side with a solid thud and Mike slumps back, curling against the pain and coughing even harder. Florence leans over him, hands at his back, and when she lifts her head to stare at Waters again there's a look of hatred on her face the likes of which Tom hasn't yet seen. Not with her. For an instant he almost feels sorry, and there's a rush of confusion, a twist of grief. It didn't use to be this way. _Waters_ didn't use to be this way.

But this place changes you.

"Spread out!" Waters turns back to the Guardsmen, some of them still wearing the respirators, all of them looking uncertain and unsettled. "Search the place. Anything you find, you leave it there and report back to me. Move!"

"He had a sample," Mike croaks, still doubled over.

"What?"

"Greg had a sample of Horse." Mike sits up again, slow, still in obvious pain but gently shrugging Florence's touch away. "An original sample. He told us."

Waters drops into a crouch, staring. "Who the fuck gave it to him?"

Mike smiles thinly. "Well, Mel, he didn't exactly get a chance to tell us."

"Fuck." Waters stands again, pulling off his beret and raking a hand through his short blond hair. "Fucking hell." He looks down at Mike again, half sneering. "What makes you think he would've told you?"

Mike shrugs. "We'll never know, will we?"

"Fuck," Waters says again, turning and striding away, over to the bank of computers, bending over them as if examining them. Tom leans over, nudges Mike's shoulder. His own breath is easing, though he can feel the coughing hovering around the edges of each inhalation.

"You okay?"

"'M fine." Mike coughs again and leans back, one hand on his chest. "I hate that shit. They didn't have to use it."

"How long does it take to wear off?"

"Not that long. You'll be coughing for a few hours. You'll be fine. We got bigger things to worry about." He glances up at Florence, something dark flickering across his gaze, and she nods very slightly. What exactly has passed between them, he's not sure, but he feels a rumble of disquiet.

Maybe it's just the coughing. He looks down at his hands, and part of him expects to see spots of red.  


* * *

  
They leave. With Elliot dead and the installation searched, there isn't a lot more to do. They tramp back through the woods, this time surrounded by Guard, though even if they did try to run Tom knows they wouldn't get very far before their muscles locked up. The animals are still dangling in the trees in the falling darkness, far more sad now than frightening. Tom ducks his head out of the way of their little dried bodies, still coughing into his fist. Florence is coughing too, pausing now and then to lean against a tree with the force of it. Mike's hand steadying on her back. There's a feeling, a faint sense, of everything slowly coming undone.

They'd found the sample back in one of the chambers that Elliot had apparently been using as a makeshift laboratory. Inert. Inactive. Or so the Guardsman had said. They'd left it there. As they climbed out of the hatch and started heading away through the trees, Tom had looked back to see two Guardsmen setting charges around the edge of the hole. A few minutes later and there had been a muffled explosion. Tom hadn't looked back again.

The three of them climb back into the humvee but they sit there for a few minutes with the Guard standing around outside, looking at each other, and there's a palpable uncertainty in the air.

"They fucked up," Mike murmurs, and sighs, coughing once as the air escapes his lungs. "They know it. I've seen men desert rather than return with a failure."

"What's gonna happen to them?" Tom asks quietly, his own voice still rough. He can't help feeling bad for them. Young men all, and now that he's met more of them, now that he knows them... It's just a fence. It doesn't mean there's any real difference.

Mike shrugs. "Dunno. Maybe nothing. Doesn't really matter." He's looking out at the deepening twilight with an expression Tom's never really seen before. Not angry, not sulking, not smirking. Quiet and sad. Florence is leaning on his arm, and after a time Tom sees her close her eyes, but he stays awake, watching Mike watching the men until there's no more light to see by. But Tom only closes his eyes once the convoy starts moving again, and even then, with the rasping sound of his own breath in his ears, it's a long time before he sleeps.  


* * *

  
As far as he knows, they drive through the night, because he wakes up in the brittle, colorless light of dawn and they're still moving. Florence is asleep, but Mike is awake, and as Tom blinks the sleep out of his eyes, it doesn't look as if he's moved at all.

He doesn't recognize where they are. He looks out the window; more fields, more dead-looking houses, but the fields look a little less dead, their brownness a little less final. They may be out of the badlands, or close to out. It's hard to tell. Tom blinks, glances at their driver and his companion in the front seats, but they haven't spoken since they set out and it feels a little strange to start now. There's a fog moving across the landscape, white and low, too low to obscure everything. It looks like a faintly transparent flood. Dreamlike. Tom blinks slowly and rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

A quick stop to eat and piss, no one saying much of anything, and by the time they're on the road again it's becoming clear to Tom that they aren't going back quite the way they'd come. For a moment he considers asking why, but it feels like everything else: both plainly factual and pointless. He doesn't need to know. He glances at Mike, still quiet, brooding, and meet Florence's gaze briefly, asking a silent question. _Is he okay?_

She gives him a tiny shrug in return. It occurs to him that he's not entirely sure what 'okay' even looks like for Mike.

"How much longer?" he asks the driver after another uncountable length of time, and the driver glances up at him in the mirror, eyes unreadable. He doesn't know the driver's name. He thinks he might feel better if he did.

"Another few hours, sir," comes the clipped reply, and then nothing else. There doesn't seem to be anything else to ask, and the very idea of trying to make small talk is too awkward to consider seriously. Tom sighs and sits back, rubbing a hand over his face, letting himself drift a little, into the lifting fog.

An hour later, or something like an hour, and they come to the town.

He knows something's wrong immediately. It's clearly an established encampment, the canvas and scrap metal shelters lining the roads, plastic flapping over broken windows, trash everywhere. It had once been a scenic little town, the kind you find all over out here; a school, a main street, a few stores and a good diner. Now it's a refugee camp, or it used to be. But even for a place where so much is wrong, it doesn't look right. There's hardly any people, and those that they pass stare up at the convoy with apprehension plain on their faces, but they don't run in panic like he'd expect them to at the sign of the crossed swords. They don't look like they could run at all, pale and hunched over, leaning against a wall or a post.

And there just aren't enough of them.

The Guardsmen taking a stint as passenger leans over and elbows the driver, speaking in a tense, hushed voice. "What the hell're we doing here? There's nothing back this way."

"I'm following the lead," the driver hisses back tersely. "You wanna go against orders, you be my guest."

"Mike," Tom whispers, reaching past Florence and touching his shoulder. Mike is staring out the window, and at first glance it looks like the same kind of half-blank stare he's kept for most of the long drive since the day before. But it's not the same. His eyes are wider, his jaw working very slightly, and Florence gives him a worried look. And then she looks away again, and at the same moment Tom's attention is caught by the same thing that had arrested hers, that holds Mike spellbound.

Down at the end of the street running perpendicular to them is an open space, a kind of square, and there's other humvees, vans, men in hazmat suits. And people. Lots of people. Some crowded into groups, some milling around the edges, some kneeling, hands folded against the backs of their heads. At this distance Tom can't see their eyes, can't make out the tone of their skin, but he doesn't have to.

"Stop the car," Mike is muttering. But they don't, and the street is starting to recede. Mike raises his voice. "Stop the car. _Stop the fucking car._"

They do, finally, but Mike is already opening the door, stumbling and rolling over as he steps out, up on his feet again. Florence jumps out after him, and as the vehicle rolls to a stop Tom follows, not knowing what else to do, deaf to the shouts of the men in the front seats. He's shouting himself.

"Mike! _Mike!_ You fucking... you'll go too far! You'll set the chip off!"

Mike might as well not even hear them. He's moving down the street, Florence following but she hasn't caught him yet. Tom breaks into a run, stumbling through garbage and debris, almost tripping over the bloated corpse of a dog. The buildings on either side of him aren't especially tall but they still seem to loom, dark and ominous. There's yelling from the square ahead. Yelling from behind them. He hears the roar of an engine, then the screech of tires and when he manages to glance back he sees another humvee rolled to a stop behind them. It's all going into a blur again, the same kind of blur as he'd fallen into underground with Elliot, clear and confused at the same time.

Mike has skidded to a stop a few yards away, Florence drawing up beside him. Ahead of them, the men in the hazmat suits have started to take some notice, one or two of them heading for the three of them. Somehow Tom is still running. Behind him, Waters's voice.

"Pinocchio! Stop or we'll shoot you in the back, I swear to God!"

_He's already stopped, you fucking idiot,_ Tom thinks, hissing through gritted teeth. He feels like he might have twisted his ankle. _Shoot you in the back. Yeah, you're good at that, aren't you, you bastard?_

He reaches Mike all of a sudden, the distance between them seeming to vanish in a blink. Mike is facing away from him, staring at the men in the hazmat suits, at the people, and his shoulders are heaving. Florence reaches out a hand, touches his shoulder, but he shrugs her away and it's not gentle.

"What the fuck," he whispers, and something about the sound of it makes Tom tremble very slightly.

The two men in the hazmat suits are approaching them now, hands outstretched. "You have to get back," one says, voice fuzzy and processed. "Sir. Please. You can't risk an exposure."

"Don't fucking tell me what I can't do," Mike breathes, stepping forward, trying to step past them. The group of people on their knees are faced by a line of Guard in respirators, guns lifted, aimed. Fired. It all seems so simple, so easy. The line of people crumples, falls, bursts into light and fades. Florence makes a quiet choking sound and turns away.

"You didn't have to--" Mike whirls on them, and Tom's breath vanishes from his lungs. He looks infected himself, pale, stricken, eyes a little wild and a little dead at the same time. He lunges past the men in the suits, and as he breaks between them there's another round of shots and another line of people falls and digitizes. It's so tidy this way. No bodies, no blood. Tom looks up in a kind of daze; the fog has burned off and it's a clear, sunny day. Somewhere, someone's screaming as Mike breaks towards the crowd. Tom knows he should try to follow, try to pull him back, but none of what he's seeing even seems to make any sense. He's never seen a suicide attempt like this.

The crowd has seen him, seen them, and now some of them—a few men, a woman with long stringy hair flying out behind her—are breaking ranks, tearing towards Mike as if they're long lost family members running into an embrace. As they run more shots cut through the air and several of them fall into the dust and disappear. The infected running, the soldiers running, Mike running, a great sense of convergence. Tom stands frozen, and it occurs to him to wonder why he can't make his legs function, why he's standing back and watching now. But Florence is at his side, suddenly, and when he glances at her he sees that her face is streaked with tears.

Time itself seems to be a different shape now.

Mike has almost reached them, they've almost reached him, when all the bones in his body seem to vanish and he drops like a sack. At the same moment the bullets find the last of the people trying to get to him and they drop without a sound. The woman goes down last, her hair whipping over her face as her back arches in a sudden spasm, and then she's gone. Tom feels his jaw stretching in a silent scream, but while the infected people vanish Mike doesn't, and the men in the hazmat suits are bending over him.

"He's fine." Tom turns, numb, and Waters is standing next to him and holding a small black pen-shaped device in his hands. "It's just the neurotoxin." He shakes his head, face twisting with disgust. "Stupid fucker."

Florence breaks away from them, makes her way over to Mike's crumpled form. She seems half blind, stumbling through the debris that litters the street. There should be bodies, Tom thinks. It's so wrong that there are no bodies. Like they were never here at all, like they don't matter. No mass graves, no ovens, no bones or ashes. Gone without a trace.

He means to follow Florence over to Mike but his feet take him in the other direction, back towards the stopped convoy. Halfway there he stops, leans against the wall of one of the buildings as everything inside him lurches up in a spasm of horror and disgust. He looks at the wall, at his hand on it, and under his palm is a long brown spatter of dried blood. He doubles over as another spasm churns through him, and he hadn't eaten much since yesterday but it all comes up in a hot, burning rush. And it doesn't stop, the heaves wrenching at him long after there's nothing left to bring up. He half collapses against the wall, shaking, tears streaming down his cheeks. He hadn't even been able to make out any of their faces. They hadn't been close enough. If they'd passed on by he never would have even known they were here.

It's not right. He can see how easy it is to kill them, all of them, and it's not right.

"Mike," he whispers, but Mike is far behind him, lying in the dirt with the blood of vanished people all around him, his nerves gone dead.

Tom isn't sure he's ever envied anyone so much.  


* * *

  
By the time they start moving again the last of the executions have been done. Tom hadn't seen them but he'd heard them, still crouched against the wall, unable to move or turn or maybe just unwilling, his very muscles rebelling against what he's trying to make them do. He's heard stories of this kind of thing, soldiers physically locking up when it all gets to be too much for them. Stories like this kind of thing. He's been in war zones. He's seen death. It shouldn't be this hard by now.

At some point after the shooting and the wailing had stopped and silence had fallen, he'd felt a touch on his shoulder and finally he'd been able to loosen and turn. Florence, standing over him in the afternoon sun, her face grave and sad and still tear-streaked.

"Okay," he'd said roughly, wiping at his mouth like he might be able to wipe away the taste of bile and dust. "Okay."

Past her, three Guardsmen carrying something man-shaped and swaying limply between them. Mike. He had felt a lurch in his chest but nothing more. If Mike were dead he wouldn't be there at all.

Slowly, feeling every ache in his body as if it were the sole sensation, he straightened up and looked towards the convoy. Soldiers were beginning to congregate around it, talking in low voices that he couldn't make out, and again there was that sense of being unsettled, But less so, now. And it made sense. The Guardsmen who had already been here, he didn't need to be told what their mission was. Contain. Control. Stop the spread. So they had all felt that their mission was done.

Even though it's probably impossible by now.

As he had approached the convoy, following Mike's body and the men carrying it, he'd heard a long, high pitched shriek from the right, and he had turned just at the same time as every other face. A little boy, a little red-eyed boy, running out of the mouth of an alleyway, face blank with terror and sickness.

"Mommy!" he was screaming, and even at that distance Tom could see the red spittle flying from his lips. "_Mommy!_"

"Peters, fucking do it!" someone had yelled, and Tom had seen, out of the corner of his eye, a raised gun, the barrel shaking very slightly. _Don't,_ he had thought, even as he'd known there was nothing else to do, and the gun had bellowed. The boy stumbled, fell to one knee, then wrenched himself up and staggered on, blood streaking down his cheeks from his eyes. "_Mommy!_"

Another shot, a solid crack in the otherwise still air, and less than five yards away from them the boy had fallen a second time, crumpling onto his face, shuddering violently, and dissolving into light.

"Jesus," the man called Peters had breathed, and before Tom had managed to get a good look at his face he had lowered his gun and turned away. A long breath. Another one. A profound numbness, and he had felt burned out, deadened. Maybe it was a blessing. One more dead kid. There were probably thousands.

He had climbed back into the humvee and slumped against the seat, listening to his breathing and the roaring pulse in his ears.

So by the time the convoy moves again the last execution has happened. Mike is seated between them, still motionless, though he has enough control over his muscles to sit upright. He can blink, he can breathe, and he seems to be able to swallow, mostly, though when they'd shoved him up onto the seat Tom had seen a thin line of drool running down his chin.

"Pricks," he'd whispered, face twisting into a ghastly kind of smile.

They drive. The sun begins to sink towards the horizon, half blocked by a bank of clouds rolling in from the north. No more towns, no more people, no more Guard other than what's with them. Could there be a Realm without people? What would that even look like? Or as the last of its processors died away, would the entire world itself begin to collapse, finally stuttering and freezing into a colossal system failure?

_Meet the virus that can end the world._

"Shouldn't've stopped me," Mike croaks, eyes closed. Tom stares at him.

"I didn't." He doesn't know what else to say. He knows what Mike's saying and he doesn't have the first idea how to answer it.

"Wasn't talking about... you."

"Pinocchio..." He shakes his head and looks away. He doesn't want to talk about this. Guilt seems pointless, and if that's so then the only thing more pointless than guilt is penance. No guilt, no penance, no redemption. That little boy's bloody face doesn't fit into a world that contains any of those things. There's none of them. There's just suffering.

Mike makes a quiet groaning sound but he falls silent again, and the entire car is silent, and Tom is grateful. He needs to compose himself. He's never been sure like this before, but he's never seen anything like this firsthand, and there's no denying the stark truth of it.

No cure, no containment. So it's just a matter of time.

He's not going to go home. He's not going to see Sophie again. He's never going to see the face of his child.

In a way it's almost a relief.  
-15-

He practically stumbles back into his room. Dexter is waiting for him and the little dog yips excitedly, hopping down off the couch and running towards him, jumping up at his knees. He bends, lifts the dog into his arms and just holds him, though Dexter struggles a little, feeling the warm furry body against his face and smelling the clean, living animal smell.

Maybe it won't affect animals. Until the very end.

He puts Dexter down again and looks at the kitchen for a while, feeling the gnawing of his profoundly empty stomach, but in the end he decides against it, and heads to the bathroom instead. The shower is long, so long he loses track, and he's left standing there under chilling water, only realizing it once the shivering becomes too great to ignore. So he gets out, towels off, gets back into his clothes. His own clothes. He's not wearing the new ones, not anymore. And he's not sleeping in that goddamn bed. Even if he tried he doesn't think he could.

He goes back into the living room, sits down cross-legged on the floor, flips on the TV. A news broadcast, what looks like some kind of gameshow, and he stops on an old movie. He doesn't even identify it past the fact that it's black and white, a little gauzy, old. Dexter curls up next to him. He leans back against the couch and closes his eyes against the droning sound. No screams. No firing. Maybe eventually he'll sleep.  


* * *

  
He doesn't know if he does or not, but the knock at the door startles his eyes open. He sits up; the movie is still going on, and with no idea of what's happening he has no way of knowing how long it's been. The knock comes again, soft but insistent, and he gets stiffly to his feet, moving over to the door. When he opens it, Mike's standing there, and of course he'd already known it would be him. He stands aside without a word and Mike walks past him, and in the dim light of the TV and the single lit lamp he looks haggard and wan. Old. He turns and meets Tom's gaze, and Tom turns away only long enough to shut the door again.

"I can't sleep."

Tom simply nods. He can't sleep either. Dexter can, snoozing peacefully on the carpet. He's gradually become sure that for all intents and purposes, Dexter has no memory.

"I just don't..." Mike trails off and shakes his head, raising clenched fists next to his temples before he drops them again. "It's so fucked up. It's all so _fucked up._"

"No argument there," Tom says quietly. He crosses his arms over his chest, not knowing what else to do with them.

"It's my fault." Mike is almost glaring at him, daring him to challenge the statement. Tom sighs and shakes his head.

"They would have made it with or without you, Mike. You know that."

Mike sneers. "Is that supposed to make me feel _better?_ You saw them, Hobbes. They were... she was..." He trails off again, swiping a hand down his face, and then his face stays covered. Tom can see that he's shaking, very slightly. It might just be the last of the neurotoxin. It might not. Suddenly he wishes so much that Florence was here, that it had been her room that Mike had gone to.

He's not even sure why he's here.

"Mike..." he says softly, and he takes a hesitant step forward, unsure, as if Mike's an animal that might bite him if he moves too quickly. There's still the numbness, but under it there's something aching and tired. He had never wanted it to end this way.

_What would you do with your last days on earth?_

Mike drops his hand, looks up at him, lips slightly parted. "What?"

He's never hugged Mike. Not ever. They've grappled, sparred, carried each other away from gunfire, held each other back from firefights. It's not like they've never touched. But they've never touched like this before, and a hug is what it starts as, but that's not how it finishes. He reaches for Mike and Mike stares at him, confused through every other emotion breaking across his face, but he doesn't pull away. Hands on shoulders, and he can feel the trembling more strongly now, and every instinct that still has anything to say is telling him to get away, get away now.

But what would you do with your last days on earth?

"What would you do?" Tom whispers, not even really meaning to, and as he leans in he tilts his head back slightly, and Mike tilts his forward, and he feels a hand at his side, warm breath on his face, warmer lips on his. It's very easy. You just don't think about it too hard.

It's chaste, at first, just a soft press of lips, and for a moment he's content to let that be all it is. Because he's never wanted a man. Because he's not supposed to want anything in the world but Sophie. But Sophie is very far away, and he's never going to see her again. And she's never going to know. And after three years of chastity, of self control, of watching Mike grinding up against some half-dressed woman in a bar, getting a glimpse of him getting his dick sucked in an alley, listening to him jerking off at night and trying to be quiet, this entire part of his life that he had to ignore, after three years of it maybe he wants just a taste.

Maybe he wants to know what it's like to just be touched again.

And then Mike's lips part, just a little, and a quiet sound drifts up out of his throat, low, barely there, and hungry. "Hobbes."

And the whole thing goes to hell.

There's a feeling of plunging into something, ducking entirely beneath the surface of a cold lake because slipping in bit by bit is far too painful. His lips part and his tongue practically forces its way into Mike's mouth, slipping past his teeth, lashing against him. Hands up, threading into Mike's hair, crushing them together as he moans breathlessly. He's never kissed Sophie like this. He's not sure he's ever kissed anyone like this.

They stumble against each other and then stumble back, Mike's hands groping at his waist, trying to hold them together. All this time, pinned together in foxholes, and with the stories he's heard and the things he's seen and the overwhelming loneliness, maybe it's strange that it hasn't happened before now. He's aware in a vague kind of way that they're headed for the bedroom, and as they stagger backwards he slips his hands up under the hem of Mike's shirt, feeling up over the flat muscles of his stomach and skin that somehow manages to be rough and smooth at the same time. Not like a woman. Nothing like. The back of his knees hit the foot of the bed and he clings to Mike and manages to keep from falling, half laughing into the kiss. He hadn't realized they'd made it that far. In the living room, the TV is still on.

"Hobbes." He can't tell what's in the word, whether Mike is asking him to stop or asking him to continue. Then, "Stop, we can't--" And he knows which way Mike is leaning, at least.

"Shut the fuck up." Can, can't, it all seems very abstract at the moment. He pulls back enough to stare at Mike, at the way he's gone from pale to flushed, at the slightly swollen touch to his lips. His palm is flat against Mike's back, a broad, strong expanse. Mike is stronger than him, not by much but he is. He's never fucked anyone stronger than him. He's never fucked anyone other than Sophie. He stares up at Mike and he knows without fear or shame or really even any emotion at all that this is going to happen. It's not even his choice. Sometimes life flips you over and rapes you.

"You can keep going or you can leave, Pinocchio."

He stares at Mike and Mike stares back, mouth working very slightly, unquantifiable things passing behind his eyes like shapes through dusky blue windowpanes. Then something subtle in his face seems to shift, some kind of decision reached, and Tom groans with need and a kind of grim triumph when Mike kisses him again, harder, teeth and tongue and the scrape of stubble against his jaw, and a taste he's never had in his mouth and yet somehow knows immediately and well. There's a lot of hands pulling at clothing, so easy to lose track of who is where, but he's on the bed with his shirt gone, Mike's shirt gone, Mike lying over him and the distractingly strange feeling of skin that's very much like his, and the press of a body that's no curves and all angles.

He moans thickly, arching up, legs spread and Mike sliding between them. He's really not sure how this is going to go, how it could go, but he hadn't planned in advance and now that he's in the middle of it any attempt at planning seems beyond pointless. Just to be touched again... Mike's breath is hot on his neck, hands big and rough on his chest and sides, and there's a hunger in every single touch that makes him want to cry with relief. Someone wants him. Mike wants him. Maybe it's just a mindless grope, like he'd thought; maybe he's just a lay and tomorrow it won't mean anything. But he thinks he could be okay with that. A world where a bleeding child crying for his mother can be gunned down in front of him isn't a world that needs romance.

Just a little bit of life. Just a spark of it, flickering and dying in the encroaching darkness. Mike is pulling his zipper down, slipping one of those big rough hands into his pants and feeling for him, whispering in his ear _is it okay can I_ and he answers with a sobbing moan, trying to shove his waistband down his hips, and that's enough. It better be.

They get each other's clothes off in a frantic rush, and he swears he hears something tear but it's not like it matters. For all he knows they might not even need those clothes again. They roll over each other, hands fumbling for any kind of hold, and it feels like fighting as much as it feels like sex. Tom gasps when their cocks rub together, gasps again when Mike reaches down between them and takes the both of them in one hand and strokes. It's clumsy but it's enough, and far too soon he's coming, muffling the sound against Mike's shoulder, his clenched fist punching blindly into the muscle of Mike's arm. Mike comes silently but for a sharp intake of breath, shaking, and he knew it would be that way. He's heard it, in the night, trying not to hear it but unable to stop it. Curiosity. Maybe something else.

Maybe a lot of other things.

At first there's just the sound of their heavy breathing, the faint drone of the TV. Mike's face is tucked against his neck and he reaches up and slides his fingers into Mike's hair, holding him there, closing his eyes against the blurring in his vision. Once when he'd been a small boy he'd climbed a tree, slipped, fallen about ten feet, hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him and send bright spots dancing across his vision. And as he'd laid there in the cool grass trying to make his lungs restart themselves, he'd realized that he had no idea how he had come to be there. There had been the tree and the ground, and a kind of rushing blankness in between.

He's fallen. He doesn't know how.

"I'm sorry," Mike whispers, and Tom makes a quiet shushing sound, and he holds him there with the sheets tangled around them, damp with sweat, come sticky between them. It's not like a woman. It's not like anyone else.

He knows he should feel sorry. He knows there should be guilt. But he doesn't, and there isn't, and even though it was never supposed to be this way he finds himself sinking into it, not comfort, exactly, but something in the same ballpark. Nothing after this can be the same. But nothing before it was good. Everything was already fucked. Whatever is coming next as a result of this can't be any worse.

After he feels Mike's breathing slow and deepen against him he lets himself sleep. In the bed, after all.  


* * *

  
When he opens his eyes again it's some unknowable length of time later, Mike still pressed warm and sleeping against his side. From the living room, instead of the drone of voices, there's the soft fuzz of static. He shifts a little, slides his hands across Mike's back, and all at once they're both awake and looking at each other. Some sort of permission is exchanged. Mike turns onto his back, Tom moving up and over him, everything as swift and easy as if they've done it a hundred times before.

This time it's slower, more of an exploration, hands and fingers and lips tracing over Mike's skin, the roughness, the many scars. Mike's light gasps and soft moans. The rush of power at realizing all the ways Tom can draw those sounds out of him. He settles between Mike's spread thighs and he's captivated; the heat of Mike's dick, the skin so amazingly soft, the glistening head and the sharp taste of it when he tugs it gently into his mouth. He's not very good at it, he can tell, but Mike's hand settles on the back of his head and guides him and it seems as though it gets better, pleasure soaking out of the noises Mike is making and into the air and into Tom's ears, his brain, his nerves, everything tingling just a little as though high in a thunderstorm, lightning cracking overhead. Then there's a flash from the window, a shattering boom overhead and he almost laughs.

_What would you do?_ He left sanity behind on the living room floor. He pulls away, ignores Mike groan of disappointment, pulls himself up and over and straddles Mike's hips. Mike stares at him, eyes suddenly wide, groping for his thighs.

"You don't... you don't have to..."

"I want to." He wants to do this once, he wants to know what it's like. Hitchins knows. He should know too. It seems only right. He's never seen this but he thinks he knows how it's done, the basics of it, and he spits into his palm, reaching behind him and rubbing it over Mike's dick.

"You'll hurt yourself," Mike is gasping, reaching for him. "Don't, let me—"

He's too late, it's too late, and Tom sinks down onto Mike's cock, tilts his head back, yells. He hadn't expected it to hurt this much; a sensation of huge invasion, his body being torn from the inside. But he chokes back a sob, arches, face twisting, and after a few moments he thinks he feels it beginning to ease. It's not pleasure. It's also not really pain, not anymore. It's some rich cocktail of the two. He manages to get his eyes open, stares down, and Mike's face has gone pale again, his mouth twisting like he's in pain. But his hands move up to settle on Tom's hips, and slowly he presses up and deeper, a high whine escaping his throat, and Tom drops his head back and whimpers in chorus with him.

He could have done this so it didn't hurt so much, he knows that. He's not sure he would have even if he'd stopped to consider.

"Fucking... do it." He practically spits the words out, leaning forward with his hands braced on Mike's chest, fingers over the small rectangular scar there, and when Mike moves next Tom moves along with him, and soon it isn't anything he has to think about anymore.

He doesn't come. Mike does, bucking up and into him with a low shout, and Tom slumps across his chest, feeling a burn that begins in his ass and moves all through him, briefly intensifying when he shifts and Mike slides out of him. He crumples to the side, breathing in short stuttering pants, and Mike curls strong arms around him. No more apologies. There isn't anything to apologize for. None of it was ever real anyway.

After a while he sleeps again.  
-16-

Before dawn, everything is silent. Even the Guardsmen on patrol walk with exaggerated softness, as if the noise of their footsteps might offend something, or rouse it from its sleep. Before dawn the silence is joined by a sense of desertion, and even the people who walk the halls seem to be not there at all. Before dawn, everyone is a ghost.

No one sees the man quietly leaving a room that isn't his and heading for the elevators, taking the car down and down. No one sees him when he exits through the silently opening door and walks down the corridor, which is as quiet and pristine as everything else. White. Spotless. No one sees him except the surveillance cameras, those ubiquitous eyes that have only gone dead once before now. Hallway, another hallway, a door and then the hiss of an airlock. The first man who sees him is the Guardsman on duty by the row of transparent cells, and the soldier nods in a kind of doubtful deference, as though he's wondering what exactly is still due to his position in this case.

"I just want to talk to her."

"She's awake." The soldier shrugs, looking faintly grim. "She don't sleep much anymore. They say it's the pain in her joints."

"You fuckin' talk about me like I'm not even here." The two men turn and she's there, hands against the clear wall, and it looks as though without the support she might not be able to stand. She's skinny, emaciated, her skin hanging off her bones as though her muscles have all atrophied at once and shockingly fast. The IV stand is still there, but the needle is no longer in her arm, though the bandage remains. Her skin is greyish, her hair looks patchy. There's a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, from one nostril. The corner of her eye, and her eyes are a brilliant crimson. She coughs, almost bent double with it, and spits bloody phlegm onto the floor. The floor is spattered with red stains.

"I'm here. For now. You talk about me like that all you want once I'm gone." Her red eyes narrow and her lips pull back from her teeth. "What the fuck you wanna talk to me about?"

"Kiana." The man steps forward. "You remember me. I'm Mike."

"I remember you," she says, her voice grating and oddly wet-sounding. "What the fuck are you, some kinda big-shot?"

"I'm not a big-shot." He looks down at his boots, at the clean tile floor. Like a giant bathroom. Something that can be easily hosed down. Wash away the blood and the piss and the shit like it was never here. He looks up at her again. "Not anymore."

"So why the fuck're you here?" She coughs again, leans her forehead against the glass. She looks exhausted beyond almost anything he's ever seen before. "The other guy. He wanted to apologize or some shit. Like he owes me one." She snorts a rough laugh, swiping at her nose with the back of one hand. "Like I'd take it."

"I don't want to apologize." A slow shake of the head. His head is half bowed, as though in a church or some other sacred space. "I just wanted to see you." He raises his head slightly. "You're gonna die soon."

She stares at him, then spits blood against the glass. "Fuck you. Prick."

"We both know it. They all know it. I'm not gonna blow smoke up your ass, honey." His words come out flat, emotionless, arms crossed over his chest, and he doesn't once wonder what he's doing here. He's known for hours. "We're all of us on borrowed time now. This thing doesn't discriminate." He smiles thinly. "It's kinda nice that way."

Her eyes narrow. "You know something about it, do you?"

"I've seen it enough by now."

"No, I think you know things." She's still glaring at him, but her mouth is stretching into a thin, ghastly smile, humorless, very close to lifeless. A death's head grin. "You tell me what you know. You come down here to fucking gloat at me, tell me I'm dying, I think you owe me something."

He takes a breath, but he doesn't shake his head, doesn't seem shaken. He glances back at the Guardsman behind him, who looks back placidly. "You said the other guy didn't owe you anything."

"He wasn't you. He wasn't an asshole." Something in her face seems to soften. "He was sad. I didn't..." She pounds one fist against the wall, weak but it still echoes through the room. "You fucking tell me. If I'm gonna die soon anyway it doesn't matter, right?"

The man stays silent, looking straight ahead at her, no wavering in his gaze. Some decisions you make, and some decisions are made for you and you can align yourself with the results or not, as you choose. But that in itself is a decision. Finally he speaks.

"I helped make it. The thing that's killing you. I was in charge of the team."

She looks back at him, her gaze as steady and level as his, though there's a trembling in her, a wavering in the focus of her eyes that suggests that even that much effort is almost beyond her. But she's calm, for a few seconds, and then she screams, screams until bloody foam sprays from her lips and onto the glass, pounding against it with her fists. She's screaming obscenities, accusations, half of it unintelligible, the rage exploding out of her dying body as red as her own blood. _My family. My mom and dad. My friends. You killed them. You killed them all._

The man turns back to the soldier. "Open the cell."

The soldier looks back at him nervously, casting a shaky glance at the girl flinging herself against the wall. "Sir... Look, I really can't do that."

"You can." The man is already moving towards the airlock set into the wall. "You can and you will. You can leave me in there if you want. You know they're just gonna kill me anyway."

"Sir..."

"I remember you." The man's voice is very gentle. "We were down in Delaware. We were pinned down. I drew them off, got you home safe. You remember that, soldier?"

A gulp. "Y—yeah."

"Do this for me and we're even. C'mon." The man stands aside, glances back into the cell. Kiana has slumped against the wall in a kind of exhaustion, staring at him with murder in her eyes, though she doesn't look as if she could even stand under her own power. "Just this one thing."

The Guardsman taps in a code and the airlock hisses open, and Mike Pinocchio steps inside, gives him one last look, a single nod. It hisses shut after him, the hum of a scan, then the door in front of him opens and he steps into the cell. There's a stench of blood and waste, and under it the dry, sickly sweet smell of death, as though she's already decomposing, though no human body has ever done such a thing in the Realm. She stares at him, fear passing briefly over her face. He opens his arms.

"It's okay. Come on. It's okay."

She pushes herself up and away from the wall and she goes to him. Not tearing at him, not furious. Cold and calm again. She goes to him, almost slipping in the blood on the floor, more blood trickling from her eyes and nose and running down her chin. She goes to him and he catches her, folding his arms around her, and she's nothing more than a little sack of bones against him. Her blood smears on his shirt. He drops to his knees, still holding her, and she looks down and slowly, deliberately, spits into his face. It's thin, bloody, and it pools at the corners of his closed eyes, and he blinks and lets it in. It trickles down over his lips and he licks them.

After a few moments she sags against him and he lifts her in his arms, carries her back over to her cot and lays her down in the filthy sheets. No one seems to have changed her bedding in a long time. He sits down on the floor, his back against the bed, and waits for the men in the suits to come for him.


	6. Containment

-17-

Later, Tom isn't sure how he'd found out. Someone had told him, somehow he'd found Florence. Somehow they'd gotten down to Containment. There's guards with them now, he realizes, though he doesn't much care. Apparently they're not as free as they had been. Maybe there's a general feeling that they no longer have as much to lose.

He glances out a window before they descend. It's another beautiful day.

He stands in that disgustingly pristine white tiled room and stares. The Guardsman behind him is a different man, looking at both him and Florence with obvious distrust. He doesn't even spare the man a glance. He's staring ahead at the newly occupied cell. In the next cell over, Kiana lies on her cot, her breathing rough and labored. But for the moment he doesn't even have a look to spare for her.

"Just tell me one thing," he says finally, his voice flat and dead. "Tell me why you didn't just eat a fucking bullet."

From his place on the floor, Mike shrugs. He's sitting with his back to the clear wall, picking at something on the plain white scrubs they've given him. "They took our guns."

Tom snorts a laugh, looks down and shakes his head, looks at Florence. She's standing next to him with her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed, and suddenly he's angry for her, more than anything. That she's being put through this. That Mike would be so fucking selfish. "You're an asshole."

"That's what she said." Mike leans his head back against the wall, looking briefly towards Kiana's cell, though he can't possibly see her from where he is. "She's not doing so hot."

"She's dying, Mike."

"Yeah, I get that." He lowers his head again. "And you get this. Don't you fucking pretend you don't. You're not that stupid."

"Yeah, I get it." Tom laughs again, rough and short, raking both hands through his hair. "I gotta say, Pinocchio, I never had you pegged as the big dramatic suicide type."

"You think that's what this is."

"I think you're killing yourself and you're making us _watch,_ Mike. You're making _her_ watch." And that finally makes Mike turn, though the look is only sidelong, his eyes widening slightly and very blue. Blue for now. "So I don't fucking know what else I'm supposed to think it is."

"How about you don't think anything?" Mike turns completely, staring at him through the wall, and Tom finds himself searching his face for any signs of the infection racing through his bloodstream. Pallor. Tiny red spots, evidence of broken capillaries. That sagging, dead look to his skin. The redness in his eyes. The coughing.

None of it is there. Of course, it's still far too early.

Mike puts a hand against the wall and Tom fights back the sudden urge to go to him, put his own hand against the wall, try to will it away and reach through. _It's not true, you're not... look at you, you're fine._ Last night, the heat of him, the desperate life surging through both of them. He wants to feel that again. The idea that he's touched Mike for the last time is impossible to conceive, let alone accept.

"Don't think," Mike says again. "Take Florence. Get her outta here. No one's making you watch anything."

Tom shakes his head, and there's a tightness in his throat that he doesn't want to be there. He doesn't want to grieve for Mike Pinocchio, not when it's happening like this, not when he's not even dead. Yet. "I'm not leaving."

Mike snorts. "Then you got no one to blame but yourself, dick."

He feels the air pushed aside as Florence steps past him, her head still bowed. She steps up to the glass, drops into a crouch and lays her hand against it, close to Mike's on the other side, and she looks at him. He looks back, and Tom watches his face slowly twist, churn, almost sickening. Finally he drops his head, and Tom is filled with the sense of having seen something intensely private, something he was never meant to see.

It might have been a goodbye. It seems too soon for it to be that simple, though. Something else. A kind of acceptance. But she's shaking her head as she gets to her feet and steps back again, and while he can't see any anger on her face, there's a fierce sadness there like a blade to the gut. She glances at him, and he can almost hear the words, they're so clear in her eyes.

_It wasn't supposed to be like this._

He knows. If there ever were rails, if they were ever on them, they're far off now. He gives Mike one more hard stare and turns away from him. The sensation of betrayal is too great. Last night... so what the fuck did any of it mean, if this is how Mike tops off the evening?

And he had wanted it to mean something. He doesn't know what. Not love, not a fucking relationship, but something. Something that isn't dying.

So he turns away and he follows Florence out, and though he can feel Mike's eyes on his back, practically burning through his skin, he ignores it.  


* * *

  
The mess hall takes him back, in some ways he hadn't exactly been ready for, back to hundred of days crowded into a loud room with his friends and with people he didn't even know, wolfing down pork chops and chicken and mashed potatoes with thin gravy and any number of other foods that might have dropped right out of a high school cafeteria. But it's mostly empty now. Maybe after the breakfast rush, the soldiers and administrators who make a temporary home here. One wall is lined with windows that look out on the long terrace and the city and Tom takes a seat by them, bending over cold cereal, trying to work up a desire to eat. Florence had left him and he wishes she hadn't. But he gets it. He would hide.

But then he'd be alone with himself.

"Hey." He looks up at the familiar voice; Hitchins, sliding into the seat across from him, his eyes wide and concerned, and he looks about twice as young as he normally does. "Mind if I sit here?"

Tom shrugs.

"It's just... look, I won't bug you, I just heard..." Hitchins pulls off his beret, rakes fingers through his hair, staring into Tom's cereal. "Pinocchio. Mike. I heard he was--"

"He is." Tom breaks in flatly. It feels like putting a sick animal down. "This morning."

"Oh." Hitchins goes quiet and pale for a moment, still looking down, beret in his hands. "How did it happen?"

Tom lifts the spoon in the bowl but none of the cereal actually makes it out of the milk and into his mouth. It's just getting soggy. He always used to let it do that when he was a kid. He used to like it like that. "He did it to himself, Hitchins."

"I don't understand. Why would he do that?" Hitchins shakes his head, looking up at Tom again with the confusion so horribly plain in his eyes. _Fuck, Pinocchio, fuck you. Fuck you so fucking hard._ "I mean... he basically killed himself. Right?" He stops himself, flushing briefly, and ducks his head again. "Sorry. I didn't mean..."

"Yeah, that's basically what he did." Tom drops the spoon back into the milk with a splosh and leans back in his seat. "Hitchins, do you know what he did before this?"

"Well..." Hitchins shifts in his seat, looking even more uncomfortable. "I mean... I know he used to work here. I know he used to be pretty high up. But it was mostly before... I was still really young. I think I saw him on TV a few times. Back when things were still getting put back together."

"But you know he used to work here."

"Yeah." Hitchins nods, giving Tom a look like that's a fairly silly question. "Everyone knows that."

"You know he was on the team that developed the virus?"

"I--" Hitchins hesitates, mouth twisting. "I heard it. He never said anything about it to me." He pauses again, clearly trying to work up the guts to say something more. "Hobbes... I know we're supposed to be enemies. And I know the Guard does a lot of bad shit out there. But there's a lot of us... we're just trying to do the best we can, y'know? We're just trying to make a life. But something like Pale Horse..." He shakes his head, brow furrowed. "I dunno. I think about that and I just... I dunno. It's not good."

"No," Tom says, and there's a ghost of a smile working its way across his face. Not warm, barely even there. But it's not sour or wry. "It's really not."

"Not now."

"No. A couple years ago."

"Why didn't you join him?" Some of the discomfort has bled out of Hitchins's face and he's looking at Tom with a perfectly open expression on his young face, curious but unjudging. "The General, I mean. He probably gave you a good deal. I've seen lots of men take it. Why did you turn him down?

Tom is silent for a few seconds before he shakes his head. "I couldn't." He smiles faintly. "It just wasn't where I was supposed to be."

"You were supposed to be out there?" Hitchins's eyes flick away to the windows and the terrace outside, the neatly potted plants in the sun and the bright city beyond. And then past that, the fence. And past that... "With her. And him."

"I thought so." Tom swallows. "Now I don't know."

"I thought I was supposed to wear this fucking uniform," says Hitchins, looking down at himself with an even deeper furrow to his brow. "Now I don't know either. I can't desert, but... there's my sister. And I have to think... what if things get worse?"

"Do you think you would ever desert?"

"Shit, no, they... they shoot you on sight if you do." Hitchins blanches slightly. "And that's if they like you. But if I could get away with my sister, be safe somewhere..." He glances around the largely deserted hall, as if afraid they might be overheard, and leans forward slightly, dropping his voice. "Yeah, I think maybe I would."

Tom nods slowly. If he could get somewhere safe. It's a stupid hope, now. Where's safe? Mike had said to leave as well, but where is he expecting them to go?

Even if they somehow escape infection, they can't escape what's coming. _The end of the world._

And Hitchins can't, either. Hitchins and his little sister.

"You should get out, if you can," Tom says quietly. "I have to warn you, though, it's bad out there. And it's just going to get worse." He laughs humorlessly and shakes his head, leaning it down against his palm. "Maybe you'd be safer here, I have no idea."

"And what're you gonna do, Hobbes?" Hitchins's voice is still low and quiet, but not as though he's trying to hide his words. As though he can sense what Tom isn't saying.

"I don't know." Tom turns, looks out the bright windows. "Die, probably."  


* * *

  
Things settle into a cold, dry limbo of waiting. That evening he and Florence walk out on the terrace and stare out at the lights of the city, close and impossibly distant. Their chips have been reprogrammed again. They can't leave the building. They haven't seen Santiago, haven't seen Waters, don't know anyone who has. If there was a feeling of statelessness before, now it's doubled, trebled. They have no purpose. There's no mission to advise on, no project to oversee. Mike is locked in containment. Already twice today Tom has heard him referenced in the past tense. Everyone seems to feel it's just a matter of time. No one seems sure who's in charge.

"What're they gonna do with us?" Tom asks softly. Dexter snuffles at his feet. Florence shrugs. There isn't any answer beyond that, even for her, and he knows it. Whatever usefulness they had is rapidly disappearing, and once Mike's gone they won't have any left at all. Might be gone before that. The city out past the lip of the terrace looks pristine, perfect and glistening, but there's a feeling of unease in the air, like the change in pressure before a storm. In the little bit of TV news he's watched he's seen no mention of any disease, but that doesn't mean a thing, and it certainly doesn't mean that people won't talk, to their wives and children and siblings and parents behind closed doors, where not even Santiago can hear them.

Unease, unrest eventually, and unrest looks for something to rally around. A symbol. A banner. Maybe a person. Maybe a simple man.

He realizes it immediately and without any fear or surprise. He's dangerous now, and Santiago will know it.

"They're going to kill me," he says, leaning over the stone rail, looking out at the sun winking off the buildings. "Probably soon."

Florence looks sharply at him, but he can see in her eyes that she isn't surprised either. Maybe she'd already known it was coming. She lays a hand on his arm, her eyes searching his face, and she nods out at the city.

_We can run. He said to go, we can just go._

"Could you leave him?" he asks, and he knows it's a cruel question before it's even out, but he has to ask it anyway. For so long the three of them have been together, fought and bled and lived together, and not once has any one of them left anyone else behind. Even when it seemed hopeless. Tom shakes his head and looks away. "'Cause I'm not sure I could."

It's not about sex. It's not even really about love. He's not sure there's a name for this kind of bond.

Florence exhales slowly, ducks her head and then crouches, scooping Dexter up in her arms and stroking his head. He's thought sometimes that she finds more comfort in the dog than even he does. After a few moments she looks at him again and shakes her head, her face twisting miserably.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly. _Fuck._ "You know it probably doesn't matter anyway. Even if we go..." He lets out a heavy breath and leans his forehead against his folded hands. "We'll stay. Until it's over. Then we'll go." And even as he says the words he knows how empty they are. Mike might well outlive him. And then...

Florence. Alone. The thought of it brings up a stinging behind his eyes.

Though, maybe she'll have Dexter. For a while, anyway.  


* * *

  
He finds that he can't sleep, lying on the living room floor with his pack as a pillow and Dexter snoring quietly at his side. He's waiting for a bullet, for a needle in his arm, for the chip in his flesh to release a final lethal dose of neurotoxin. There's really no reason they even have to come near him to kill him. It's not fear, not at all. It's just the sensation of waiting, expectant, wondering when and how it might be.

Really, it's like coming home.

But home is a thing that he's not sure even exists anymore, and so after an hour, two, lying in the dark and staring up and into it, he gets to his feet and heads out into the quiet building, traveling down and down. The underworld, he thinks with a wry smile. Orpheus descending to rescue his beloved.

He doesn't think Orpheus was ever quite this pissed off. And there's not going to be any rescuing.

Mike is lying on his back on the low cot, one arm over his eyes, but Tom can tell, from years of long experience, that he isn't sleeping. Kiana is on her cot as well, but she's not awake in any real sense of the term. Tom can barely look at her. She's tiny, emaciated, half curled on the thin mattress with her skinny arms drawn up against her chest. Her fingers are stained with blood, more sinister red stains around her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Now and then she frowns slightly and twitches, as if troubled by some problem for which she can't find the solution.

Tom turns away from her, steps close to the clear wall that separates him from the little room that's become Mike's world, taps lightly on the glass. Mike drops his arm and lifts his head, his face twisting into an unidentifiable expression when he sees who it is.

"Fuck're you doing here?" he sits up, swinging his feet onto the floor. "Thought I told you to get the fuck outta here."

"And you really thought I would?" Tom laughs slightly, looks down. "When have I ever done what you told me to do?"

He's expecting a snide remark, a sneer or some sarcasm, but instead Mike smiles faintly and shakes his head. "Yeah, I guess not. Guess I shoulda known." He lifts his hand and coughs into it, delicately, but he's clearly trying to make it seem less severe than it is. Tom pulls in a shuddering sigh. "So why're you down here?"

Tom looks up again. "Couldn't sleep. I wanted to see you."

"You and wanting to see people."

"I know. I know, it's a bad habit." Down here, like this, he's discovering that all his anger is beginning to evaporate, and in its place is a desperate kind of warmth, and a deep sadness. Maybe this is what Florence had been feeling. The sensation of touching something that won't ever happen now. He reaches out and lays a hand on the glass. "Mike..."

"Don't." Mike shakes his head slowly. "Look, it's just..." He drops his face into his hands for a moment or two, drags in a long breath, and again Tom thinks it, though with no rage. _He's killing himself and we're watching it happen._ "You know, it doesn't matter anymore what we do. You were there with me. You saw it."

"Is that why you came to my room?" Tom looks down at him, hand on the glass, and all he wants to do in that moment is reach through and touch him, one more time. He doesn't care that they aren't alone, doesn't care what kind of look the Guardsman must be giving him right now. "Because it doesn't matter what we do?"

"No, it was..." Mike's face twists, something anguished flashing briefly over it. "Hobbes, I just needed... I don't know. I didn't mean for it to happen like that."

"You didn't." It's not what he'd wanted to hear. It's not what he'd hoped for. He's not sure how much of it he believes. But it's not like he hadn't expected it. "Okay, Pinocchio. Well, maybe I did mean for it to happen. So you can blame me if you want."

Mike stares at him. "You..." He laughs quickly, disbelievingly, and looks away at the wall. "But aren't you, like... _straight?_"

"Well, I dunno, Mike." Tom slips his heads into his pockets. Suddenly he's tired. So this worked after all. "Maybe people are just more complicated than that."

Mike doesn't say anything else. Tom turns and leaves, not even bothering to spare the Guardsman a glance, and when Kiana groans softly from behind him he walks a little faster.  
-18-

He doesn't see Waters until the end of the next day. It might seem like a chance meeting, just two people bumping into each other, but Waters grasps him by the front of his shirt and tugs him through a door, into a small, empty briefing room, pushing him towards the table and shutting the door behind them. Tom stumbles, almost falls, turns and glares. If this is the assassination he's been waiting for, there could be a little less shoving involved.

"What the fuck do you want, Waters?"

Waters waves his hand in a shushing gesture. "You saved my life, Hobbes. You remember that."

Tom's eyes narrow, and he crosses his arms over his chest, leaning back against the edge of the table. "Yeah, I remember." He smirks faintly, unpleasantly. "Thought maybe you didn't."

"Fuck you, Hobbes." But Waters seems impatient more than anything else—impatient and afraid. "You have any idea how many times I coulda killed you by now? And here you are. You think there might be a reason for that?"

"Yeah." Tom cocks his head to the side. "I thought maybe you were an incompetent fuck who could never shoot straight."

"I'm gonna let that go," Waters says, "because I do owe you. And I know you're pissed at me and you probably have a right to be. But look, Hobbes, you have to get out of here. Soon as you can. If you wanna live."

"They're going to have me killed, aren't they?" Tom asks, utterly calm. Seeing the look that overtakes Waters's face, he knows. "You don't have to tell me. It's pretty obvious. When?"

"They aren't sure yet." Waters looks down and away, almost as if he's ashamed. "Soon. Maybe next week. They're still hashing out the details." He looks up again, and for the first time Tom sees how drained he is, how hollowed out. It's been hard to connect this face with the man he used to know because in a very real way, the two are no longer connected. And he thinks of Mike again, and he understands a little more. "They're scared out of their minds, Hobbes. They can't stop this. There's people dying out there in waves. A few of them made it through the fence last night."

Tom's eyes widen slightly. "What?"

"Infected people. They're trying to get in past the fence, all along the border. They think we have a cure. They think we released Pale Horse just to wipe them all out, get the land."

"And that wasn't the plan?"

"Hobbes..."

"What do you want, Waters?" He lifts a hand, scrubs it down his face. He almost wishes this _had_ been the assassination. He's so tired of waiting. "You trying to save me? You really think there's any point to that? Do you really give a shit about what happens to me, or is this you just trying to salve your conscience? 'Cause I won't help you do that. Not after what you did to her." Her blond hair flying as she'd fallen and faded, and it doesn't matter that it hadn't really been Sophie. It had been Sophie. Just not his Sophie. But he'd loved her all the same.

Waters's face darkens. "You wait till you're in my place, Hobbes. Then you can judge me." He turns, opens the door and looks back. "And your buddy, Pinocchio... you think I'm bad, I guess you don't know him as well as you think."

"He's dying, Waters," Tom says simply. "I know him as well as I need to."  


* * *

  
He goes to see Mike. He doesn't really want to, but he's drawn, pulled by that bond for which he can't find a name. A different guard in containment, an older man, who gives him a suspicious look when he walks in but who otherwise doesn't try to stop him. Doesn't speak to him at all. Tom stares at Kiana, who doesn't even look like she's moved, and Mike, sitting with his back to the wall that divides his and Kiana's cells, slowly unraveling one sleeve of his white scrubs. He looks up at Tom, smiles thinly.

"Never thought dying would be so goddamn boring." He glances past Tom, as though he expects to see something that isn't there. "Where's Florence?"

"She hasn't come down?"

"Not since you were here." Mike coughs into his hand, and it goes on for what seems like a long time, until Tom's closing his eyes and looking away. When it's over he leans back against the wall, breathing a little heavily, and takes a swallow from a bottle of water at his side. "Throat's fucking burning. 'S the worst part so far."

"I don't know why she hasn't come to see you."

"I think I do." Mike looks down at his hands. "That was goodbye, the other day. Mostly. She'll probably pop in at the end, but she's..." He shrugs, and for an instant he looks sadder than Tom thinks he's ever seen him look. "She can't do anything about it. So it's like it's torture for her. I don't want her putting herself through that."

_The end._ It's strange, to hear it talked about so matter-of-factly. But it's also true, so perhaps there's no point in sugar-coating it. And he's sure, and he's been sure for a while, that Mike Pinocchio is a man who's lived with the idea of his own death for a long time.

"I'll bring her down if you want," he says softly, and Mike shakes his head.

"Don't. I'm serious, Hobbes. I don't want that."

"Do you want anything?"

Mike smiles, almost dreamily. Since he's come here, entered the place where he'll probably die, Tom has seen anger and sadness on his face. But he also realizes, at once and abruptly, that he's never seen Mike look so at peace as he does now.

"I want a big fucking steak," he says. "I want it so rare it's bloody. And a decent beer. They're feeding me shit down here."

"I'll get you a steak," Tom says, and the world blurs a little in front of his eyes. "I promise. I'll get it to you somehow."

"Hobbes..." Mike slides over, closer to the glass, reaches up and lays his hand against it. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about all of this. It wasn't supposed to happen this way."

"How was it supposed to happen?" More blurring, a tightening in his throat, and he knows he's going to have to turn away. Mike looks up at him, fights back another cough, and through the blurring Tom can see the redness creeping into the whites of his eyes.

"You were supposed to go home."  


* * *

  
It feels as though he's picked up Mike's fever, the way the hours and then the days bleed together, and at some point it occurs to him that there's really no difference between Mike in his cell and himself sitting in his room. Both waiting. Both walking dead men.

It's comforting.

He wakes up. He showers. He feeds himself, feeds Dexter. He finds himself more and more in Florence's company, the two of them sitting in silence in her room or out on the terrace. They don't need to speak. There's nothing really to speak of. Even Dexter is silent more and more. The world immediately around them holding its breath.

And the world outside slowly going to pieces. There's nothing about it on the news, at least nothing directly, but over the next three days, the few times Tom turns the TV on to watch for any signs of Pale Horse's approach, he senses a kind of forced cheerfulness on the part of the pretty young news anchor, and that sense grows and grows with every broadcast. At night he stands by his open bedroom window and he hears sirens howling through the streets. Once he sees the distant bright flare of something exploding into flames. In the hallways there's whispering, increasingly worried, between soldiers and staff alike. He still hasn't seen Santiago. Down by the mess hall on the third morning, he overhears one older woman tell her younger friend that it's no longer clear whether or not Santiago is even still in the city.

He has a bunker somewhere, Tom's sure. A place to wait out anything. More than that, he has a portal, and while the Realm tears itself to pieces he can sneak out by the back way and close the world behind him.

And that, more than any other idea, still makes him angry.

"I dunno what he'd do," Mike says when Tom asks him. "He's never had to deal with anything on this scale before." He's leaning up against the glass again, face slack and bored, and more pale than when Tom had last seen him. He lifts his hand to his mouth and lets loose another long, hacking string of coughs, wiping at his mouth when he's done, and although he tries to keep his hand closed, turned away, Tom can see a flash of crimson on his fingers.

"You think he'd leave?"

"The Realm?" Mike swallows hard, leans his head back against the wall and lifts a hand to his temple as though it's paining him. "He might. I guess eventually he's gonna have to."

There's a soft, muffled groan from the adjacent cell and Tom glances up, and so does Mike, though, still, there's no way he could see from where he is. Kiana, now on a respirator, almost hidden under tubes and blankets, immobile but still somehow fighting.

"They've got her on a transfusion," Mike says, and he seems to shudder. "I don't even know why they're trying to keep her alive. They stopped treating her for anything days ago." His face twists, half hidden by his hand. "It seems... cruel, I dunno."

"You wanted that," Tom says softly, and he knows Mike will know what he means, and he knows it'll sting.

"I didn't want it." Mike drops his hand and stares out at Tom. The redness is creeping more and more into his eyes, crimson standing out in a pale face. "It's not like that. You don't get it."

So they're back to this again. Tom shakes his head and looks away. He's tired of this fight. He doesn't want to have it anymore. "I don't think I get anything, Mike." He turns, hands swinging uselessly at his sides, nodding to the guard as he heads for the door. He doesn't look at Kiana as he leaves. This time, as with every time, he feels as though he should be saying goodbye.

But he doesn't.  


* * *

  
On the morning of the fourth day, everything explodes.

Tom wakes up to sirens. Not outside, inside the building itself, and the sound of running feet outside his door. He sits up from his pallet on the floor—the TV still droning inanely, left on again overnight—and blinks uncomprehendingly. Of all the unexpected things he'd started to anticipate, this doesn't even begin to come close. He goes to the window and looks out; a line of humvees and trucks, perhaps ten vehicles long, heading out towards the city center.

Something.

As he opens the door, ordering Dexter to stay, and heads out, he wishes all over again that they'd been allowed to keep their guns. Given something else. Anything. He feels infuriatingly helpless. Two Guardsmen hurry past him, then a third, bumping his shoulder as he passes and not bothering with an apology. Tom stares after them and heads towards Florence's room; he's halfway there when someone else hits him, stalking along with his head down, ramming him square in the chest and almost sending them tumbling to the floor together. He catches the man by the shoulders, trying to steady both of them, letting out a sound that manages to be exasperated, surprised, and relieved all at once.

"Hitchins. Jesus Christ, man, keep your head up."

"Hobbes." Hitchins seems to pull in a breath, straightening, reaching out and laying his own hands on Tom's arms. "You gotta... you should stay in your room now. Keep your head down."

"Why? What's happening?"

"The fence." Hitchins swallows, as if trying to get himself under a kind of control. "Huge breach, about ten miles away. People with cars, guns. Infected." He shakes his head and glances back, almost like he expects to see them coming. We're trying to contain them, but I just... if they make it to the city... my sister..."

Tom's heart breaks a little. No way to tell him the truth, no way to do that to him. He squeezes Hitchins's shoulder and he thinks _I wish I'd known you in a different time. I wish we could have been friends._

"Get her," he says. "Get out of here, Hitchins. If there's anywhere you know of, anywhere remote... go for that."

"I could go north..." Hitchins frowns hard, something twisting his face. "But there's people... I swore to protect these people, Hobbes. I can't--" He shakes his head again, steps away and at the same time pushes Tom gently back, and Tom can see something switch over in his brain as he moves into a different mode. A more distant one. "Go back to your room. Please. I have to insist."

Tom sighs, strangely defeated. Then again, it's really not so strange. "I was going to find my friend. I'll stay with her, just let me get to her."

Hitchins looks doubtful, but finally he sighs and nods. "All right. Just get to her quick. The next guy who stops you might not be as understanding." He inclines his head down the hall. "I have to get out there."

"Hitchins." Tom reaches out, lays a hand on his shoulder again, and the stab of regret is fresh and strong. Whatever Mike saw in him... he wants to believe it wasn't just a fuck for its own sake. Part of him even does. "Take care of yourself."

Hitchins nods. "And you. Get going."

Racing down the hallways, more sirens in the distance. At one point he thinks he hears shooting, but it can't be, there's no way the fighting can be that close already. He's close to Florence, and then something changes, some decision is made behind the scenes in his own brain, and he finds his feet carrying him on a path he could now walk in his sleep, towards the elevators. But the elevators are packed with Guard, or at least the one he manages to call is, and he finds himself turning towards the stairs, descending and descending, his steps echoing on the concrete.

He'd thought it was only a few floors down, but somehow it seems to be a lot further than that, and as he heads downward the lights grow dimmer and begin to flicker, and in places the concrete itself seems to be crumbling. Now, he's seeing the skeleton behind the shiny facade of Santiago City. The ruin of the old building, half destroyed by war and simple neglect. A great deal of care paid to the things people are most likely to see. But there are fundamental weaknesses, cracks in the foundations.

It was madness to think a fence would ever really do the job.

Finally, counting floors as he goes, he reaches what he thinks must be the right one and tries the door, only to find it locked. To the left of the frame is a scanner, but not a scanner of any kind he's seen before, and he puzzles over it for a few seconds before something occurs to him, and he lifts the inside of his arm to its faint red light. There's a pause and then a soft beep, and he's almost smiling as the door unlocks with a hiss and he pulls it open.

Coming at containment from this angle is strange and he stands in the white corridor for a few moments, trying to get his bearings. He's been here so many times by now, but not like this, and in fact it might be the familiarity that's making things harder, like an image seen many hundreds of times, rendered unrecognizable by a slight alteration of angle. When he finally settles on a direction and begins walking again, it's freshly unnerving how quiet it is down here. The sound of his own footfalls and the soft hum of air vents and, somewhere, some unidentified machinery, but nothing else. Mysterious doors, and no idea what's behind any of them but one. Maybe he should have made a greater effort to find out.

When the airlock hisses open and discharges him into the main cell block, the first thing he notices is that there's no guard. The second thing he notices is that Kiana's cell is empty. The respirator, her blood-spattered sheets, the filthy floor, it's all still there. But she's gone. He steps closer to the clear partition and lays his hand against it. Part of him knows what's happened, is surprised it took this long. Part of him doesn't want to believe it at all.

A rough cough from the other cell, and the sound of something being spat onto the floor. Mike. "She went this morning."

Tom turns, moves over to stand in front of him and looks down. Mike is curled on the floor, a sheet half tangled around him, white scrubs stained red here and there and his breath coming in slow, ragged inhalations. He rolls slightly to the side and looks up at Tom out of one eye, blue circle in a hell of red. Tom feels everything in him going cold bit by bit. It's so much worse than the day before, as if some crest has been reached and passed and now there's nothing ahead but an increasingly speedy decline.

"She had convulsions." Mike coughs again, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, face screwing up in pain. "She fell on the floor. She was crying. No one helped her. I couldn't..." He makes a sound, a choked sob, and starts to move. After a second or two, Tom realizes with faint horror that he's trying to get up. "There's no one here. Where's everyone, Hobbes?"

"They're all gone outside." The words move past his lips like numb things. "There's trouble out by the fence. People are getting in."

Mike laughs raggedly. "So it's starting. Good. Took too fucking long." He gives up and slumps back to the floor, loosing another long round of coughing. "This is taking too fucking long." He looks up again out of that one baleful red eye, cheek pressed against the floor. "I guess you probably wouldn't shoot me if I asked you to."

"I don't have a gun," Tom whispers. _You should have thought of that before you did this to yourself. To us._

"Fine." Mike makes that awful sound again, the wrenching groan, and he coughs until he retches, and with a heave of his shoulders he turns and vomits blood and bile onto the white tile floor, not much of either but against all the terrible whiteness it's all Tom can see, and he takes a step backward, feeling a scream pressing against the inside of his throat.

"Get outta here." Mike lifts his head and he's bleeding from his eyes, slow red droplets smearing down from the corners and Tom realizes that he's crying. "Get Florence. Go. Please."

_There's no point,_ he thinks, but he can't say anything. There's something solid and painful blocking his throat. He's been taking this so in stride, but Mike's been holding on, and seeing him like this makes it all real in a way he now realizes it hadn't been, before.

And he knows, if he had a gun, he'd put a bullet in Mike Pinocchio's head.

He turns and stumbles back, the knowledge like a spiked wheel rolling over his brain, blinding making his way out through the airlock and into the corridor. For a moment he stands there, looking around as if lost, before that behind-the-scenes brain kicks in again and he starts back towards the stairs. He has no idea if this is the right decision, has no idea if it even makes sense, but if there's one thing that can still help this... he has to try. Apathy isn't an option anymore.

He's ashamed that it ever was.  


* * *

  
Finding his way to the right floor is harder this time, and once he's here he's not immediately sure where to go. He's been to containment countless times now, but he's been here only twice, and once again the angle is strange, and the entire place is as deserted and tomblike as everywhere else. He stands in the center of the corridor, closes his eyes and tries to remember through the panic and the horror churning through his mind, picturing the way he'd gone, the directions, trying to feel it.

He starts walking before he opens his eyes again, still not sure but surer of it than of anything else. Gradually things begin to look and feel familiar, as familiar as they can with everything a blinding white, but when he sees the little plaque with _Defensive Technologies. Computer Division_ he feels something faintly hysterical jump in his chest. When he steps through the door there's the blue scan again but he ignores it, pushes on through into the empty office.

"Hello?" He turns in the middle of the floor, looking at abandoned cubicles, closed doors, everything with the look of having been left abruptly and in a great hurry. "Anyone there?"

"Hobbes?"

He jumps, inhaling sharply, and when he turns McDonald is standing there in the doorway of his office, looking utterly surrpised. "Jesus, I thought they would've killed you by now." He steps forward, reaching for Tom's shoulders. "You're—you're okay?"

"I'm fine," Tom says, blink a little bewildered. It occurs to him that he hadn't really expected to find the exact man he'd been looking for. "But Pinocchio is... he's sick, and there's a breach out by the fence..." He swallows hard, feeling suddenly foolish. "I thought... OSCAR... is there anything we can do?"

McDonald looks at him for a long moment, and then a strange kind of smile tugs at the corner of his lips. "There is. I'm glad you're all right, Hobbes. You're in a unique position to appreciate this."

"I'm..." Tom stares at him. He's not sure what that smile is about, but there's a tickle of unease in the back of his mind. "Appreciate what?"

"I know you." McDonald leans a little closer. "They haven't been hunting you for no reason. You're a threat to them. You want to bring them down." The tugging curve takes over and he smiles, nodding slowly. "Like me."

Tom takes a step back, shrugging off the man's hand. Somewhere, wheels are turning and things are being added up. Little disparate things, seemingly unconnected, and maybe he's crazy or maybe he's half blind with panic, but suddenly he feels sure.

"It was you," he says, shaking his head slightly. "You stole the sample. Didn't you?"

"I didn't have to." McDonald is still smiling, as though the accusation doesn't surprise him in the slightest. "I helped some others do it. They've been running the field tests for me."

"Field tests?" Tom spits the words, feeling a surge of cold anger. All along... so close... "People are _dying._ How many have died already? For what? What the fuck are you even trying to do?"

"People?" McDonald's smile fades and his face twists in faint confusion. "Hobbes... they're VC. They're not people. They digitize, they go back to raw code. They're just part of the system."

It's not the first time he's heard someone talk like that. It's not the first time someone has used that as an excuse. He thinks of Kiana, of Florence, of the people on their knees in the town square and the slow cold anger fires into rage.

"You were wrong about me," he growls. "We don't want anything _like_ the same thing. You were... you were so fucking wrong."

McDonald's face goes from confused to something darker and he steps back, one hand slipping into his pocket. "I guess I was. Sorry to hear that." He sighs and glances back into his office. "I was going to bring you with me, keep you safe while I release what I've been working on into the ventilation system. I was going to take care of Santiago and his lieutenants without even having to be in the same room with them." His eyes narrow. "But I guess now you can go with the rest of them. I'm disappointed. I really expected you to be pleased."

"Santiago... They're here?" In the midst of everything else, that still surprises him. "What have you been working on?"

"A special strain. It works much faster than the original." McDonald smiles again, unpleasantly. "But I don't need to explain it to you. You'll get to find out pretty soon, right?"

"Wrong," Tom growls, and lunges for him. He's a slight man, and Tom gets an arm around his neck without too much difficulty, ready to bring him down, when there's a fumble and he feels a pricking sensation in his arm, and the world goes first cloudy and then dark.

_Fuck._  
-19-

Waking up comes very slowly, and it's only a few minutes into the process that he realizes that he's exactly where he was. He sits up groggily, blinking, rubbing at his eyes; McDonald is nowhere to be seen and with the everpresent fluorescent light down here, it's impossible to say how long he's been out.

He might already be too late.

Florence. He has to find Florence. He stumbles out of the office and down the corridor towards the stairs, rubbing at the sore spot on his arm, wondering if with every breath he's pulling the virus into his lungs. Wondering, but no way to know. The new strain is supposed to work faster. How much faster? How long before he starts to bleed out of his eyes?

Up the stairs, up flight after flight until he's panting, gripping the railing as if he might fall, and he knows he's not this out of shape. What McDonald had stuck him with, maybe. Who knows.

He breaks out on the right floor after what seems like an age, stumbling down the hallway towards where he knows Florence must be, where she has to be, pounding on the door and leaning against it so that he almost falls when she opens it, staring at him in shock.

"McDonald," he pants. "He's the one... has Pale Horse. He's gonna release it in the ventilation system. Infect anyone who's still in the building."

On Florence's face, the shock darkens to cold horror, and a grim determination. She reaches out, takes his shoulder to steady him and as she touches him he feels strength flowing back into him.

_We have to stop him._

"I will. I'll find him. You..." And an idea strikes him. It might already be too late for it, but if it isn't... "Get anyone you can find, get them down to containment. All the air down there is filtered. It might be the only safe place now."

She looks at him, a hundred nameless things moving past the insides of her eyes, and she glances to the side as if she can see something he can't. He can hear her thought, almost as though she's spoken it aloud.

_Mike._

"I'll go to him," he says, even though he's not even sure what that means. "I'll... I'll take care of him. Just get the others."

She looks at him unhappily for another few moments, before she nods and turns to go. He stands there for a minute or two. Dexter. But there's nothing to be done about Dexter right now, and anyway, he might be fine. Might be safer where he is. He starts off back towards the stairway again, only to freeze in the bright space of the main lobby when he hears his name called.

"Hobbes!" The voice is familiar, and he turns to see Hitchins running towards him. "Hobbes, come on, I thought I told you--"

"I need your gun."

Hitchins stops and blinks at him. "You... what?"

"Your gun." Tom nods down at the sidearm at Hitchins's hip. "I need it. I don't have time to explain why. And you need to get every man you can find and get down to containment."

"Why? Hobbes, what--"

"Just do it." He reaches out, grips Hitchins by the shoulder, maybe a little harder than he means to. "Hitchins... what's your first name?"

"It's..." Hitchins swallows, and, crazily, Tom thinks he looks almost like he might be about to cry, eyes glistening under the light of the ornate chandeliers. They're green, Tom realizes. He's never really noticed before. "It's Jonathan. Jon."

"Jon." Hobbes loosens his grip slightly, though he doesn't let go. "Please. I need you to trust me."

"All right." Hitchins laughs a little, sounding close to a kind of quiet hysteria, reaching down and unholstering his pistol. "It's loaded. You're good to go. Hobbes."

Tom takes the gun, feeling a powerful sense of relief at the weight of it in his hand. "What?"

"I wish... I wish everything was different."

Tom manages a faint smile. "Me too."  


* * *

  
Containment is still empty, except for Mike, still curled on the floor. He doesn't move as Tom enters the main block, and for an instant Tom wonders if maybe he's dead, until he remembers that's impossible. If he were dead he wouldn't be here anymore.

No sign of McDonald. No sign of anyone else so far. He has a little time to do this. He turns and there's a locker set into the wall. He knows what's in it. He's seen it. He pulls it open and takes out a respirator, a pair of gloves. Not the best protection.

But maybe it doesn't matter anymore.

There are going to be people here. Crowded inside. It's better—better for everyone, maybe most of all Mike—if it happens this way. He steps to the airlock, taps in the code. He's seen that too, and committed it to memory. The door hisses open, shut, and then the door ahead of him opens and it's then that Mike stirs, lifts his head.

"Hobbes."

"Hi." His voice is muffled and processed by the respirator, and it feels wrong. He should be able to speak to Mike in his own voice, with nothing between them. He's not trying to hide the gun in his hand. Mike's gaze hits it, and raises to Tom's face again, and he looks relieved.

"I didn't think you'd really do it."

"Hitchins loaned me his piece." Tom drops into a crouch next to Mike, reaches out with his gloved hand and strokes his fingers through filthy hair. As far as he knows, they haven't even let Mike bathe. He hasn't shaved. His jaw and cheeks are dark with the beginnings of a beard, with blood crusted onto the skin.

"Hitchins." Mike smiles weakly. "Good kid. I was... dreaming about a kid. Skinny. Dark hair. I didn't know him but I felt like I did. You ever have a dream like that?"

"All the time." He has no idea if that's true or not. He flicks the safety off the gun. "Mike... are you sure you want this?"

"It hurts." Mike coughs, but it's weak and shuddering, and blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, flowing over cracked lips. "Hurts everywhere. I'm so tired, Tom. Just... just want it to be over."

"Okay." It isn't until the goggles covering his eyes start to mist that he realizes he's crying. He lifts the gun, lays it against Mike's temple. "Won't be long for me, anyway. Probably not for any of us. It was McDonald the whole time. He's shoved some kind of new strain into the ventilation system. Or he will. Probably doesn't matter."

"McDonald?" Mike's eyes widen and he lifts his head again, heedless of the gun barrel pressed against it. "Jesus..." He laughs shortly. "Fuck, I shoulda known it."

"I don't see how." Tom shakes his head. "I found him when I was trying to get to OSCAR."

Something in Mike's eyes seems to switch on, some remnant of a light. He lifts his hand to the gun, pushes it gently away from his head. "You said... Help me sit up."

"Pinocchio?"

"Just do it." He grunts under Tom's hands as he's helped up, leaning heavily against the wall, shaking as the coughing takes him again, but now he only seems to half notice it. "OSCAR. I think..." He raises his hand into the air, two fingers up, as if conducting an invisible orchestra. Or bestowing some kind of blessing. "Holy shit, I think you had the right idea."

"What?"

"I need you--" Mike breaks off again, coughing so hard that he ends up back on the floor, half braced on his hands, Tom's gloved hands on his back. "Fuck." He spits blood onto the floor, but even in that action Tom can feel the life in him. He'd been ready to give up. Now, for whatever reason, he's fighting again.

Tom doesn't quite dare to hope.

"I need you to get me to OSCAR. Can you do that?" He lifts his head, red-blue eyes burning. "I think... if you can get me there, I think maybe I can make all this right again."

"How?

"Never mind. Just get me there." He struggles against the floor, trying to push himself up, and Tom gets to his feet, reaching down and lifting him bodily up. It's then that he truly realizes how much skinnier Mike is, how much he's been eaten away by the virus, no more substantial than Kiana had been at the end. Like he's half digitized already. Mike leans one hand against the wall, groping for breath, and then he takes one staggering step forward.

"Just get me outta the cell. You can leave me from there. Save yourself."

Tom looks down at the gun in his hand, thinks about what's almost happened. Thinks about Sophie, such a distant vision now, thinks about this dying world that he's come to think of as home. Thinks about Florence's sad, determined face, thinks about Dexter, about Hitchins, about all the faces and names they've found and lost. Thinks about Mike, the taste of his lips and the strength in his rough hands.

He pulls off the respirator and lets it fall. Mike stares at him, wide-eyed.

"You're insane."

"No more than you."

Mike smiles weakly. "Touche. But you're also a dead man, Hobbes."

Tom takes a step towards him. "I was that anyway." He slides an arm under Mike's shoulders, leans down, gently kisses his bloody lips, and Mike seems to loosen and solidify at the touch, both at once.

"Come on. We do this together or we don't do it at all."

One shaky step in front of the other, and they make it out of the cell, out of the block, out into the blinding white corridors beyond.  


* * *

  
Every foot feels like a mile. Mike stumbles, coughs, twice bends and retches up blood, though his stomach should be long empty, but the blood is bright red and fresh, newly shed. The last time, there's bits of something semi-solid in the blood, and Tom realizes that it must be his stomach lining.

Even now, the bullet seems like a kindness.

Down the long corridors, up the stairs, Mike's gasping and soft groans of pain echoing up and up and down, bouncing off the concrete walls and stairs into a chorus of misery. Tom asks him if he needs to rest. Mike only shakes his head. Tom knows without having to be told: if they stop now that could be it. If he sits down he might not get up again.

Out and into the brightness again, so white it hurts his eyes, and this time he knows where he's going. Down the corridor, Mike's dragging steps eerily loud, and when he finds the right door he almost can't believe they've made it. He half expects to see McDonald again, but when they make it past the scan, the offices seem to be empty, and McDonald's door is standing open.

"That way." Mike nods off down one of the hallways, and Tom follows the direction, remembering as he goes, close to dragging Mike with him. The door, ahead of them, the steel. The retinal scan on the wall. The door is shut, and Tom feels a heavy sinking sensation in his middle.

"It's locked."

"Of course it's locked." Mike is hardly walking on his own at all now, Tom supporting almost all of his wait, but he reaches out as if he could touch the wall from where he is. "Get me to the scanner. I think I can get us in."

They make it to the door, and Mike leans heavily against it, Tom taking the second to breathe, wondering if the virus is already eating away at his cells, his code. If it hadn't already been. He can't feel anything.

Mike is peering at the scanner, and finally he presses a tiny panel at the side and a larger panel slips open, revealing a number pad. Mike starts punching in a code. Starts and doesn't stop. It goes on and on, and after a few moments Tom realizes that Mike's eyes are shut and his lips are moving slightly, as if dreaming or recalling the words to a poem or song. Finally it ends, there's a pause, and the door whooshes open.

"Give me the gun."

Tom hands it over without question or protest. This isn't the time for that now. He takes Mike under the shoulders again and they step through into OSCAR's chamber, and McDonald is bent over the console. He turns with a start, his eyes wide. "You--"

Mike shoots him. There's no buildup, no fanfare, no supervillain exposition. A gunshot and a flicker, and then just the ghost of McDonald's shocked face left behind in the empty air where he had been. Tom stares. He hadn't thought anything could really surprise him anymore.

Mike pulls away from him, stumbling over to the console and leaning heavily against it, reaching for the keyboard and starting to type. "He was... Jesus." He lets out a long breath, a breath that turns into another barrage of coughing. "He's released it. It's already out."

"Fuck," Tom breathes, but he's not even that surprised. Not even that upset. Too much time. He hadn't been fast enough. "How long do we have?"

"I don't know." Mike's fingers are flying over the keyboard, page after page of text flashing onto the screen. He can hear Mike muttering to himself, hardly any of it intelligible, and he doesn't really care. He leans back against the wall, scrubbing his hands over his face. They're bloody. Mike's blood. It seems fitting.

But Mike isn't dead yet. Mike's muttering is getting louder, more excited.

"This isn't just for analyzing code. This is tied to every computer in the city. Computers back east. Everything." Mike gasps lightly. "It's... Jesus Christ." He lifts a hand to his mouth, rocks a little on his heels. "I can't believe... I wonder if anyone knew."

Tom lifts his head wearily. "What?"

"Nothing." More typing. "Nothing. Hobbes, you remember when he was talking about how you could hook someone up to this?"

"Yeah." Tom frowns. "But that was just a theory. And he said it would kill whoever tried it."

"Yeah." Mike turns, aims faster than Tom would have thought he could, and there's a sharp crack and Tom's leg explodes with agony.

"_Shit._" He fumbles for it, hands covering a hole in his thigh, a hole that's pumping blood out between his fingers. He stares up at Mike, lips numb and moving. "What the _fuck?_"

"I know you, Tom." Mike is tuning back to the keyboard, typing again, this time more slowly. More deliberately. With purpose. "You weren't really gonna shoot me. You wouldn't let me do this now. We're all walking corpses but I bet you'd still try to stop me." He turns back to Tom, and he looks small and exhausted and sad. "I can't take that chance."

"You... you _shot_ me."

"Oh, you noticed?" Mike laughs roughly, falling back into weak, shuddering coughing, making his way to the table over which hovers the white sphere. Tom stares at it, wondering how something so innocuous and small could suddenly look so sinister. With an effort, Mike pulls himself up onto the table and lies back, knees drawn up. Whatever he's doing, the table clearly wasn't built for it. Tom looks down at his leg, at the blood still pouring out through his fingers. There's a lot of blood. It's not spurting the way it would if Mike had hit the artery, but it's still a worrying amount.

"Mike..."

"You'll be fine." Mike turns his head, looks at Tom with his red eyes, and Tom almost wants to scream at the sight of the bloody tears gathering at the corners. "I'm really sorry, Tom. Really. I wish this had all been different."

Tom shakes his head, the pain in his leg suddenly distant. He knows what this is. "No..."

"Tell Florence what happened. Tell her I'm sorry, too."

"Mike, don't."

"I have to." He closes his eyes, turns to face up, face the sphere again, the blood running down the sides of his face.

"Upload."

The little soccer ball panels open on the sphere again, the same as last time, and for a moment nothing happens. Then the beams of light extend and brighten, brighten beyond anything Tom would have expected of them, brighten until he can no longer look directly at them and he raises a bloody hand to shield his eyes. There's a scream—long and rough and bizarrely triumphant—and then all the light seems to compress, the light of the beams, the light of Mike's digitizing body, folding into a bright singularity, a star in the room, and Tom has to close his eyes. He thinks he might be shouting. The brightness is a torment, lasering through his eyelids and into his brain, and he covers his face with his hands to try to escape it, pleading incoherently to something he's sure can't hear him.

And the light expands.

He feels it like something solid, washing warmly over him, everything slowing and stopping though he can still move, but it isn't like any movement he's ever felt before. It's like moving in water, slow and graceful, and as he watches the hole in his leg shrinks, the blood seems to run backwards, and through the tear in his pants he can see new skin, pink and flawless. Not even a scar.

_I will remake you._

He lifts his head, and it's Mike's voice but it's not, and it's Mike's face but it's not. The light, the screen, the white sphere and the beams radiating out from every possible point, bright enough to pierce the universe.

_Who are you?_

_I am the Construct._ A rumble of musical laughter. _I am the ghost in the machine._

_Mike?_

_No. And yes._ He feels a soft touch, like a breeze on his face, a breeze shaped like fingers. _You are all remade. You are all free. The Realm will subsist._

_I don't understand._ Somewhere, he can feel the warm wave of light moving through corridors, up through rooms, washing over shocked faces, out into the streets and over the fields and through the forests. Washing over a frozen scene of combat, turning the weapons to ash, turning the broken fence into cobwebs. Over ruined cities and towns, countless refugee camps, over the starving and the sick and the desperate and the mad. Soothing. Healing. Making whole. Rearranging the code of everything. _This is Florence,_ he thinks. _This is the voice of her power._

_You do not need to understand. There is only one thing you must do._

"What?" he gasps, down on his knees in the wash of light, trying to see. Trying to see the face of the bright thing standing in front of him. It seems to bend towards him, and through the light he sees a pair of very blue eyes.

_Get your ass home, dick._

When the light recedes it leaves him stranded, and he sags back against the wall, staring down at the place on his leg where the wound had been, staring at the empty table, the quiet sphere. After a few moments he starts to cry. He's still crying when Florence finds him.


	7. Epilogue: Remission

-20-

Later, he's wrapped in a blanket in a plush chair up in the lobby, shivering with shock and the feeling of everything being turned inside out, at the center of it all a furious desire to see that light again. The doors are wide open, letting in a cold draft, and Guardsmen wander in and out with dazed expressions on their faces. None of them appear to be armed.

Florence sits close beside him, her hands closed around his. He hasn't told her much. He's not sure what he's told her. _There was a light._

_Mike is dead._

She hadn't seemed surprised. She'd folded him into her arms and held him, and he'd cried against her neck until others had come, frantic, questioning, and he doesn't remember very much after that.

"They all thought I was special," he says softly, staring down at his hands in hers. He laughs shortly. "So much for that. I didn't save anything."

Florence cocks her head, looks strangely thoughtful. She gives his hands a squeeze, reaches up with one of hers and touches his chest over his heart. It's a gesture she's made before, and he's known what it meant before, but now he's not sure.

"I'm not special," he says again, staring at her. "I'm not."

She shakes her head, somewhere between amused and sad, and takes his hands again. She looks up and Tom turns his head, following her gaze. Hitchins is coming towards them, looking bewildered.

"Everyone checks out," he says. "No sign of the virus anywhere. And I mean... _anywhere._" He reaches up, takes off his beret and rakes a hand through his hair. "And people out fighting at the fence... they say their weapons just vanished. The sick people got well in seconds. None of it makes any sense."

"Did they see a light?" Tom asks quietly, looking up at him. Hitchins gives him a quizzical look and shakes his head.

"No one said anything about any light."

"Okay." Tom drops his head into his hands. "I need to go back to my room. Please."  


* * *

  
It happens that he opens his eyes to find himself standing on a wide strand of shoreline, a beach that stretches off in either direction for as far as he can see. Beyond the line of sand is a thick jungle, the kind he'd expect to find on a tropical island, and it occurs to him that that's exactly where he might be. It should be surprising; he'd closed his exhausted eyes in his bed in his room, Dexter curled up next to him, cold nose against his hand. But here he is, and it's not surprising.

He walks down the beach a little ways, and though the sun is high it's not yet late enough to be hot, and the breeze off the water is refreshing. At a certain point he reaches a promontory of rocks and begins to climb, and when he looks up again there's a man sitting on the flat of one of the highest stones. As he gets closer he raises a hand in greeting, and after a second or two the figure turns, raises a hand in kind. A few moments more and they're close enough to speak to each other, and for Tom to see who it is.

"Hey," says Mike, and that's not altogether surprising, either. He nods to the space on the rock beside him. "Have a seat."

Tom does, looks around, and from here he can see much further down the beach and further still inland. He thinks he might see people a great way off, and what looks like a path cutting through the trees.

"What is this place?"

Mike smiles, and there's something purposefully mysterious in it. "That's kinda hard to explain."

"You're dead." Once he looks back at Mike it's a little hard to stop. He looks nothing like he had when Tom had last seen him. He's strong, tanned, and there's a peace about him that would be disarming if it didn't seem to make a kind of sense all its own.

Mike laughs. "In a way, I guess. I guess that's right." He spreads his arms, gesturing to all around them. "This place... it's a kind of crossroads. A lot of different paths converge here." He shakes his head slightly, and for a second regret flashes across his face. "But not yours. And not the Mike Pinocchio you knew."

"So why am I here?"

Mike shrugs. "Who knows? Enjoy it. Go swimming or something."

"I'm dreaming," Tom says, and part of him is just realizing it and part of him has known all along.

Again that smile, something like mischief dancing behind it. "Aren't we all?" Mike draws his knees up to his chest and rocks backwards a little. "I had a dream where I was with someone, and I didn't know them but I did. You ever have a dream like that?"

"All the time," Tom whispers.

"Okay, then." Mike reaches out and gently cups his cheek, his hand broad and rough and warm, and Tom's eyes slip closed, prickling at the corners.

"Time to wake up."  


* * *

  
"It's the damndest thing," Hitchins says. "We still can't find any of 'em."

They're sitting out on the steps in front of the building, looking out at the city—the new city, where no one is exactly afraid, but everyone is deeply confused. No one seems sure of anything. No one seems to understand what's happened. But there's no violence, no chaos. No uprising. It's eerie.

"And you're sure they didn't leave?" Tom pulls his arm back and tosses the tennis ball. It bounces away over the terrace and Dexter chases it, yipping happily. Hitchins shakes his head.

"No one saw 'em go, anyway. And the portal up at the top floor logs every use. Unless they covered their tracks, no one went in or out that way."

"Portal?" Tom looks up sharply. Beside him, he feels Florence's touch on his arm.

"Yeah." Hitchins nods. "Just the one. It's locked up pretty tight. Or it was. But we had a technician look at it. No one's used it in days, not Santiago, not any of his top men. So unless he has something else hidden somewhere..."

"Right," Tom says, but he sounds absent and he feels it. A portal. _Home._ He closes his eyes and sees blue eyes looking back at him, so he opens them again.

"So they all just vanished." He looks over at Hitchins again, meditative. "So who's in charge?"

Hitchins laughs faintly. "Right now... hell, man, no one knows. And I don't think I hate the feeling."  


* * *

  
It doesn't stay that way for long. Days pass, a week, and Tom can feel them gravitating towards him, all of them, more and more of them consulting him more and more of the time. His advice about legal disputes. About city management. About how to deal with the large number of soldiers who now find themselves without weapons. About how to accommodate a growing flood of refugees venturing past the place where the fence had been, first a trickle and then more and soon threatening to become a flood.

But it's curiosity, it seems, more than desperation. Men return from the wastes and report that they're wastes no longer. Dead trees bearing fruit, the little green sprouts of vegetable crops and grain poking up through the soil of long-abandoned fields and gardens. The streams and rivers running wild with fish. Deer, healthy and plump, roaming through the woods.

It seems, more and more, that there is a great deal less to fight over.

It's around that time that the exodus begins. Like the refugees, it starts small: one man coming up to Tom and saying that he'd heard of a portal back home, he had a wife, children, all he wants is to get back to them, please. Then two more, then five, and finally he shakes his head, steps aside. The portal isn't his to control. They never had to ask him in the first place. If they want to return home to the Real World there's nothing stopping them.

So they go.

The first night of the exodus, he dreams of Sophie, and he can no longer remember her face, the way it looked, the feel of it under his hands. He opens his eyes and lies in the dark, the sheets tangled around him, the bed he'd shared with Mike for one night. He thinks about a thousand minds, a thousand computers that make the Realm real. Or that used to.

_ You are all free. The Realm will subsist._

Had it really been enough? Those few seconds? But Mike's gone.

Mike's gone.

Unless it's time to rethink what "gone" really means.  


* * *

  
More and more of them, leaving, and there's not a new glitch or anything else unusual to be seen. He's not sure how it's possible. Maybe he'll never entirely know, what happened in those few seconds when Mike was swallowed by the light. He tries to get back down to OSCAR, and the room is unlocked, but the keyboard is unresponsive, the screen dead and dark, the white sphere silent and lifeless. He pokes at it for a while, then sinks down into the seat in front of the console and stares at the table. The gun is still there, on the desk next to the keyboard. He picks it up, looks at it for a few seconds, puts it down again. Absently, he reaches down and rubs at a spot on his thigh that's paining him.

Wherever Mike is, he isn't here anymore.  


* * *

  
When he finally goes he's among the last, headed up to the top floor with Florence and Hitchins in tow. It's hard to say what makes the decision for him. Statelessness. Weariness. The way, when he closes his eyes, there's another set of eyes looking back at him reproachfully.

"You can't go," Hitchins mutters once they step out into the featureless hallway. "You can't. You've been so..." He reaches out and takes Tom's arm, turning him, face beseeching. "Who's going to be in charge now?"

Tom leaves aside the obvious protest of the idea that he was ever in charge to begin with and regards Hitchins thoughtfully. "How about you?"

"Me?" Hitchins almost squeaks the word. "I can't... I wouldn't... I don't _want_ to be in charge."

"In my experience, the people who don't want the job are the ones most suited to do it," Tom says placidly, scooping Dexter up into his arms. He nods at Florence, smiling faintly. "She'll help you."

"I--" Hitchins stammers, and falls silent again. Tom turns to Florence, pauses, petting Dexter's head. Another second or two and he reluctantly sets Dexter down by Florence's feet.

"Stay." He looks back up at her. "You'll take care of him?"

She nods, and there are tears standing out in her eyes as she takes a step towards him, puts her arms around him, and for a moment or two he lets himself lean against her, feeling her strength flowing into him.

"I'll miss you," he whispers. "I'll miss you so much."

She nods against his shoulder, pulls back just a little, leans in and presses a kiss to his cheek. _I'll miss you, too._

He swallows hard when he finally pulls away, trying to blink the blurring out of his eyes. This isn't death, not really, but it's goodbye, and probably goodbye forever. The world he's going to might not feel exactly like home anymore, but this is not his home either, and he's been told. Asked. The last thing he'd been asked.

As he turns and the door hisses open in front of him, revealing the gleaming room and the soft reclined chair, a line comes to him, from a movie or a poem or a book he might have once read.

_You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole for many years. You have so much to enjoy, and to be, and to do._

He settles down on the chair, and Hitchins fits the headphones over his ears. Florence touches his shoulder, and then withdraws her hand. Tom looks up, into the light, and when it blinds him he closes his eyes, and meets the eyes behind his own.

_Time to wake up._

 

-end-


End file.
